Coot Club. Arthur Ransome

      THEY HAD SEEN HIM

      On and on. He must not stop for a moment. He paddled as if for his life. Whatever happened they must not catch him. Mixed up with foreigners? Why, that would be the very worst kind of mixing. For everybody who did not understand about No. 7, he would be entirely in the wrong.

      He thought of landing by the boathouse with the ship for a weather vane, startling the black sheep, and leaving the Dreadnought in the dyke below the church. But supposing the Hullabaloos were to see her, why, the first person they asked about her would tell them to whom she belonged. No, he must go much farther than that.

      He was close to the entry to Ranworth Broad when he heard again the loud drumming of the Margoletta’s engine away up the river. Too late to turn in there. The dyke was so straight. They would be at the entry long before he could get hidden. He paddled desperately on and twice passed small dykes in which he could have hidden the punt and then dared not stop her and turn back. Louder and louder sounded the pursuing cruiser. Would he have to abandon ship and take to the marshes on foot? And with every moment the thing he had done seemed somehow worse.

      And then he rounded a bend in the river and caught sight of the Teasel. That yacht had been lying in that place for over a week. He had noticed her several times when sailing up and down inspecting nests for the Bird Protection Society. There was nearly always a pug-dog looking out from her well or lying in the sunshine of her foredeck. Tom had noticed the pug, but had never seen the people who were sailing the Teasel. At least for some time now they had not been sailing. Just living aboard, it seemed. And today it looked as if they had gone away and left her. The dinghy was there, but that meant nothing. There was no pug on the foredeck, and the awning was up over cabin and well. Perhaps the people were away on shore. And, at that moment, Tom had an idea. He could abandon his ship and yet not lose her. He could take to the reeds and yet not leave the Dreadnought to be picked up by the enemy. All those yachts were fitted out in the same way. Every one of them had a rond-anchor fore and aft for mooring to the bank. Every one of them had an anchor of another kind, a heavy weight, stowed away in the forepeak, for dropping in the mud when out in open water….

      Tom looked over his shoulder. The cruiser was not yet in sight, but it would be at any moment. Things could not be worse than they were whatever happened. His mind was made up. With two sweeps of the paddle he brought the Dreadnought round and close under the bows of the moored yacht. He was on deck in a flash with the painter in his hand. Up with the forehatch. There was the heavy weight he wanted. Tom lay down and reached for it and hoisted it on deck. He made his own painter fast to the rope by which he lowered the clumsy lump of iron into the punt. He wedged his paddle under the seat, and stamped the gunwale under, deeper, deeper, while the water poured in. The Dreadnought, full of water, and with that heavy weight to help her, went to the bottom of the river. Tom scrambled to his feet, jammed the hatch down on the anchor rope, and took a flying leap from the Teasel’s foredeck into the sheltering reeds.

      *A rond-anchor is a stockless anchor with only one fluke for mooring to the rond or bank.

CHAPTER V

      ABOARD THE TEASEL

      WILLIAM was not aboard the Teasel. He had had a rather upsetting day, what with being left alone in the boat in the morning and having to make room for these newcomers in the afternoon. For some little time after tea he had lain as usual on the foredeck, catching the last of the sunshine and knowing that he made a noble sight for anybody who might be sailing up or down the river. But the short spring day was ending. People were settling down for the night. There was no one to admire him. He went back into the well and heard Dorothea say what a handsome pug he was, but those newcomers seemed unable to do their washing up without splashing. He went on into the cabin. Mrs. Barrable was writing a letter and took no notice of him. He was annoyed to find some of her paint brushes soaking in a jam-pot half full of turpentine, left on the floor just where he could not help coming across it. If he had not been prudent in sniffing, that turpentine might have ruined his nose for a week. How careless people were. Thoroughly sulky, William went out again through the well, getting dreadfully splashed as he did so, climbed on deck, and went off along his private gangplank to the shore to dig up and enjoy anew one or two treasure smells that he had hidden, some little distance away, on the strip of firm ground that lay behind the fringe of reeds.

      Mrs. Barrable was making little drawings in the margin of her letter and on her blotting-pad. This was a habit of hers and, when she was writing to the mother of Dick and Dorothea, it did not matter. Writing to strangers, she often had to copy her letters out all over again, because of the illustrations that had somehow crept in. Once she had had to pretend she had lost her butcher’s bill and ask him to send her another because, without thinking what she was doing, she had decorated it with a row of three cats with black mourning bows, weeping large tears at the sight of a string of sausages. But writing to her old pupil, Mrs. Callum, Mrs. Barrable could send her letters just as they were, no matter what drawings she had scribbled in the margins. Today the margins were full of small sailing boats, because Mrs. Barrable was still seeing those little white-sailed racers, and because she was still thinking of the disappointment of Dick and Dorothea. They had been very good about it. Dick was busy making a list of birds seen, and Dorothea, on hearing how Mrs. Barrable and her brother had had to give up their plan of sailing round to the southern rivers where they had spent their childhood, had almost seemed to forget her own disappointment as she saw scene after scene in the woeful story of the returning exile wrecked almost within sight of the ancient home he had hoped to see once more before he died….

      “Very nice children they are, my dear,” Mrs. Barrable had written, “and Dorothea is very like the little girl you used to be, but, you know, I should have been afraid to ask them here if I had known they both had such a passion for sailing…. They have told me now about those children they met in the north, those mumpy children” (here was a picture of a child with mumps) “who seem to have got it into their heads that sailing is … what it really is, my dear, as no one knows better than I. And, of course, they want to learn and I fear they will find it very dull to be cooped up in a yacht that is moored to the bank and really no better than a houseboat with only an old woman like me to keep them company.” (Here she had let her pen run away with itself and there was a picture of a pair of lambs and an old woman in a poke bonnet all frisking together.) “Now, if only my brother were here instead of painting his Begums and Ranees, we should be sailing all over the place, though then, of course, there would be no room for Dick and Dot. I really had not thought how tempting it would be for them to see the other boats going by. There was one they saw today with two little girls…. Poor Dot! I ought to have remembered that windmills and reeds and slow rivers plaiting reflections and just asking to be painted may be enough for me but not for the ambitious young. But there’s no one to come with us and sail the Teasel and tell them the names of the strings…. I know them myself, my dear, but she’s a hired boat, and I don’t know what brother Richard would say if I were to go sailing away without some expert hand to pull me out of scrapes. No, my dear, it’s a pity, but Dick and Dorothea will have to be content …”

      Mrs. Barrable drummed on her teeth with the end of her penholder and glanced through the cabin door into the canvas-roofed well, to see Dick earnestly wiping plates, and Dorothea, with a hand luckily small enough to get inside, scooping the tea-leaves out of a little tea-pot. What fun it would have been to take them round the old haunts, away down to Yarmouth and through Breydon Water and up the Waveney to Beccles, where she had been a child herself…. And then she looked out of the opposite port-holes, and forward through the children’s cabin. There was a port-hole right forward, beside the mast, through which she could see a charming circular picture of the bend of the river upstream. Interesting, she thought, to paint just such a picture…. Her mind wandered from Mrs. Callum and her two guests busy in the well, and she thought of canvas and paints, and of what her brother would say to such