Chapter XVI: A Cut at the Coil

Twice, during the autumn, it seemed as though the riddle would be solved, or at all events the knot cut.

George Hempath and young Harben had gone off to school, but the reduced company still took its fill of the freedom of the sands. Sir George and Margaret rarely failed, and play and work progressed apace.

Boating on that coast was all toil and little pleasure. With a tide that ran out a full mile, the care of a boat, unless for strictly business purposes, would have been a burden. Old Seth Rimmer and his fellows kept their craft in the estuaries up Wytham way and at Wynsloe, where, with knowledge of the ever-shifting banks and much labour, it was possible to get out to sea in most states of the tide.

But Eager, desirous of an all-round education for his cubs, managed to teach them rowing in Kattie Rimmer's shallop on the Mere, to Kattie's great delight, since there she shone at first alone.

And it was there they made the acquaintance of Kattie's brother, young Seth, a great loose-limbed giant of nineteen or so, who helped his father at the fishing at times, and at times went ventures of his own on less respectable lines. A good-humoured giant, however, who would lie asprawl on a sand-hummock by the Mere-side, and laugh loud and long at new-beginners' first clumsy attempts at rowing, and more than once waded waist-deep into the water to set right-side-up some unfortunate whose ill-applied vigour had capsized the crank little craft.

Some of young Seth's doings were a sore discomfort and mortification to the older folk in the little wooden house. But he took his own way outside with dogged nonchalance, bore himself well towards them except on these sore points of his own private concerns, and worshipped Kattie.

Old Seth, you see, had always ordered his little household on the strictest--not to say straitest--lines of right and wrong. Young Seth, when he grew too big for bodily coercion, kicked over the lines and took his own way, in spite of all his father and mother could do to prevent him. And his way led at times through strange waters and in strange company.

He was away sometimes for days on end, and then, whether the little house lay basking in the sunshine or shaking in the gale, his mother would lie full of fears and prayers, and his father was quieter than ever in the boat, and Kattie, but half-comprehending the matter, would feel the gloom his absences cast and would question him volubly when he returned, but never got anything for her pains.

He would do anything for her or for any of them--except give up the ways he had chosen.

When the south-wester screamed over the flats for days at a time it set the ribbed sands humming with its steady persistence. Games were impossible then, and Eager's ready wit devised a means of turning the screamer to account.

He turned into Bob Ratchett's shed one day and said:

"Bob, I want some wheels--two big ones four feet across, and two about a foot smaller, and the tires of all must be a foot wide."

"My gosh, them's wheels! What'n yo' want 'em for?" grinned Bob admiringly.

"I'm going to make a boat--"

"Aw then, passon!--a boat now!"

"To run on the sands."

"Aw!" gasped Bob, and eyed "passon" doubtfully.

"You can make them?"

"Aw! I can mek 'em aw reet, but----"

"All right, Bob. You set to work, and I'll see to the rest."

"Passon's" boat became a great joke in the village. But bit by bit he worked it out, got his materials into shape, and with his own hands and the assistance, in their various degrees, of the boys and the excited oversight of Gracie, fitted it together into a somewhat nightmare resemblance to the skeleton of a boat.

Jack stuck pretty steadily to the novel work. Jim and Gracie fluttered about it, questioning, suggesting, doubting, went off for a game, came back, danced about, hindering more than helping, but always convinced in their own minds that but for them that boat would never have been built.

The two large wheels, rather wide apart, supported it abeam forward, and between them he stepped a stout little mast carrying jib and mainsail. The smaller wheels astern moved on a stout pin and acted as rudder, actuated by a. long wooden tiller. A rough wooden frame abaft the mast offered precarious accommodation for passengers. And when at last, after many days, it was finished, the villagers crowded round it, and joked and laughed themselves purple in the face over the oddest and most unlikely craft that coast had ever seen.

Then willing hands took the ropes, and dragged it out of the village and through the gullies of the sand-hills with mighty labours, and so, at last, to the edge of the flats not far from Carne.

And there Eager climbed in by himself, with not a few fears that the doubts and laughter of the village might find their justification in him.

There was a strong wind blowing with a steady hum right on to the flats from the south-west. Eager hauled up his sails, lay down in the meagre cockpit, tiller in hand, and the scoffers started him off with a run.

They looked for him to come to a stop when they did; but instead, to their never-dying amazement, the wind gripped the sails, the clumsy-looking boat sped on, faster and faster, bumping over the hard-ribbed sands, rushing through the wind-rippled pools, and they stood gaping. In less than five minutes it was at the bend of the coast where it turns to the north-east, a good three miles away, and then, marvel of marvels for such a craft, just as they expected it to disappear round the corner, it ran up into the wind, came round on the other tack with a fine sweep and without a pause, and was rushing back towards them before their gaping mouths had closed. "Passon's" boat was a huge success, it raised him mightily in their opinions and inclined them to give ear even to his suggestions for the abolition of stinks, and to the boys and the rest it gave a new zest to life. Day after day, whenever the wind served, they were at it, and looked forward to the gray windy days as they had never done before.

Sir George had been away when the boat was launched, but he rode over the first morning after he got home, and after watching it for a time ventured on board himself, with Eager at the helm.

"Man!" he said, as he tumbled out after the run--blown and breathless and considerably shaken up--"that's wonderful! You ought to have been an engineer."

"So I am," laughed Eager, "and on a larger scale than most."

From the windows of Carne, Sir Denzil watched the novel craft careering wildly over the flats, and snuffed more hopefully.

"A sufficiently dangerous-looking toy, Kennet. It seems to ate that it might quite well kill one or more of them if it upset at that speed. Let us hope for the best!" And he and Kennet watched the new goings-on with interest.

Incidentally, the sand-boat one day came very near to solving the riddle of Carne on the lines of Sir Denzil's highest hopes.

There was something in the wild headlong motion that appealed with irresistible power to Jim's half-tamed nature. The mad bumping rush, with now one huge wheel barely skimming the ground, now the other; the hoarse dash through the pools, when, if the sun shone, you sat for a moment in a whirling rainbow of flying drops the keen zest and delicious risks of the turn; the novel sense of power in the lordship of the helm; these things thrilled him through and through, and he could not get too much of them.

He made himself the devoted slave of the sand-boat--spent his spare time in anointing its axles with all the fat he could coax, or otherwise procure, from Mrs. Lee, till the great wheels almost ran of their own accord, scraped the long tiller till it was as smooth as a sceptre--handled the ropes till they were as flexible almost as silk.

It was he who insisted on naming the boat _Gracie_--"because it jumped about so," but in reality, of course, because the word Gracie represented to him the brightest and best that life had yet brought him.

They had all tried their hands at names. Sir George--_The Flying Dutchman_, because it certainly flew and was undoubtedly broad in the beam; Margaret--_The Sylph_, because it was so tubby; Gracie--_The Sand-fly_, because it flew over the sand; Jack, for abstruse reasons of his own--_Chingachgook_; Eager was quite content to leave it to them. But no matter what the others decided on, Jim always called it _Gracie_--to the real Gracie's immense satisfaction; and as he talked Gracie ten times as much as all the rest put together, _Gracie_ it finally became.

When wind and weather put the Gracie out of action she lay under the walls of Carne, with folded wings and docked tail--for Jim always carried away the tiller into the house, for love of the very feel of it, and partly perhaps in token of proprietorship. It stood in a corner where he could always see it, and slept by his bedside.

No one, however, ever thought of meddling with the sand-boat. In the first place, she belonged to Mr. Eager, and they held "passon" in highest esteem. And, in the second place, Carne was a dangerous place to wander round at night. Mr. Kennet had a gun, with which he was no great shot, indeed, but even the wildest bullet may find unexpected billet in the dark.

It happened, one afternoon in the late autumn, that Eager was away on the confines of his wide sheepfold, about his Master's business. It had been wet and blusterous all day, and the boys were desultorily employed on their books in a corner of the kitchen; Jim with the _Gracie's_ polished tiller twisting fondly in his hand, as a devoted lover toys with a ribbon from his mistress's dress; Jack somewhat absorbed in the doings of Themistocles and Xerxes at Salamis, in a great volume which he had abstracted from the library the day before.

The polished tiller wriggled more and more restlessly in Jim's hand, as though it longed to be up and doing.

He got up at last and strolled out just to have a look at the rest of the _Gracie_. Jack was too busy sinking Persian galleys in Salamis Bay to pay any heed to anything nearer home.

Jim found the wind blowing half a gale. It swept round the house with a scream, and seemed to meet again full on the _Gracie_, who quivered and throbbed as though longing to be off.

The jib had been wrapped round the forestay, and the wind, working at it as though of one mind with him, had loosened the clew, and it was thrashing to and fro in desperate excitement.

He climbed aboard, fitted the tiller, and sat in vast enjoyment. Why, it would only need a pull at a rope here and there, and he believed she would be off. The rain had hardened the soft sand, and there was a good slope down to the ribbed flats below. He had always longed for a run all by himself, and he knew the ropes and how to steer her as well as Mr. Eager did.

In sheer self-defence he captured the thrashing sheet and twisted it round a cleat. The jib untoggled itself from the stay, bellied out full, and the boat began to move slowly down the slope.

The joy of it sent the blood up into Jim's head and set it spinning. He would have a run--just a little run--all by himself, just to prove to himself that he could do it.

The boat went rocking down the slope. He hauled at the halyard in a frenzy, and the mainsail went jumping up. He made it fast, grabbed his beloved tiller, and the _Gracie_, with a roll and a shake, bounded away up the flats.

Faster and faster she went, the ribbed sands and the wind-whipped pools seemed to sweep along to meet her and fly beneath her all-devouring wheels, till Jim's head was spinning faster even than they. He yelled and waved his arms above his head, till the tiller banging him in the ribs nearly knocked him overboard and recalled him to his duties.

He was at the bend in the coast before he knew It. He threw his weight on to the tiller to bring her round on the curve which would allow her head to fall off on the other tack, but fooled it somehow, and instead she flew off at a tangent straight for the sea.

"Ecod!" said a watcher--for other purposes--in the sand-hills. "'Oo's gooin' reet to stick-sands!"--and started at a run after the _Gracie_.

Jim always stoutly maintained that if he had only had room enough he would have got her round all right. But space and time were wanting.

All in a moment the solid ground seemed to vanish from below the whirling wheels. One wheel sank down into comparative space, the other spun on horizontally; the _Gracie's_ nose went down out of sight into a squirming mass of slimy sand, and Jim was flung head over heels into the midst of it.

He got his head up with his mouth full of watery sand which half choked him. Before he had coughed it out, fear and the clammy sand gripped him together. It clung to him like thick treacle. His feet and legs were bound and weighted--he could not move them. And when his arms got into it the deadly sand clasped them tightly. It was up to his chest, like cold dead giant arms folding him tighter and tighter in a last embrace, or the merciless coils of a boa-constrictor.

Presently it would have him by the throat, and the stuff would run into his mouth and choke him, and he would die and they would never find him.

He tried to shout, with little hope of any one hearing; but it was all he could do. The clammy death was at his throat, and the pressure on his chest was so great that his shout was of the feeblest.

Another minute and the riddle of Carne would have been solved. But feeble as was his shout, it was answered. The runner on the sands came panting up, and the sight of his anxious face was to Jim as the face of an angel out of heaven--and a great deal more, for Jim had never troubled much about angels.

"Help--Seth!"--he bubbled, through the sandy scum.

"Ay, ay, sir!" panted young Seth, and jumped on to the half-submerged _Gracie_, whipped out his knife from its sheath at his back, and sliced the stays of the mast and had it out in a twinkling.

"Lay holt!"--and he shoved it towards the disappearing Jim. "And hang on tight, if it teks yore skin off! That's it. Twist rope round yo'!" And he dug his heels deep into the firm sand beyond, and laid himself almost flat as he hauled at his end of the mast.

The sweat broke in beads on his forehead, and rolled down his red face like tears, before the sands would let go their prey. But, inch by inch, he gained on them, while Jim gave up his legs for lost, so tightly did the sands hold on to them.

Inch by inch he was drawn back to life, joints cracking, sinews straining. It seemed impossible to him that he should come out whole. But there--his neck was clear, his chest, his body, his knees, and then, with a "swook" from the "stick-sands" that sounded like a disappointed curse, the rest of him came out and he lay spent on the solid earth beyond.

He remembered no more of the matter, but learned afterwards how young Seth, after thriftily staking the mast in the sand and lashing the _Gracie_ to it with a length of rope to prevent her sinking out of sight--had taken him over his shoulder, not quite sure whether he was dead or alive, but face downwards, so that if he were alive some of the sand and water might run out of him, and had set off with him so, for Carne.