CHAPTER VIIIN THE FOG
“Green-y blue, blue-y green,Best-est fire that ever was seen!”
“Green-y blue, blue-y green,Best-est fire that ever was seen!”
“Green-y blue, blue-y green,
Best-est fire that ever was seen!”
chanted Ronald in the Lighthouse sitting-room one foggy evening in the late summer.
It was indeed one of the “best-est,” if not theverybestest fire that ever was seen, for it was built of driftwood from some old copper-bottomed wreck and the flickering flames were pale blue-y green like a robin’s egg, deep green-y blue like a peacock’s breast, yellow as star-shine and sunset clouds, while underneath glowed a deep red, with now and then a purple bloom upon it.
“I picked up the wood on the shore this morning,” said Mr. McLean, looking at the fire with satisfaction, “and brought it up with the oil on the car with Jenny Lind. It must have come from the wreck of the oldHamburg.”
“When was she wrecked, Father?” asked Ronald.
“Oh, long ago, before our time. It was on a nightjust like this, probably,” looking with a shiver at the blank, white-covered windows. “The Captain of theHamburgwas steering straight for us, they say, hoping to catch sight of the Light through the mist, but his aim was too good and he sent his ship right into the hundred-foot channel between the islands and a sunken rock did the rest. The men were all saved, I believe, but the good ship lies there still, or most of it, only the water is so deep that you can’t even see the topmasts.
“God help the poor folk at sea, to-night!” sighed Mrs. McLean, “and we so cozy here!”
It was the usual evening party at the Lighthouse, Margaret McLean knitting, her husband smoking and reading his book, and Lesley and Ronald playing checkers at the table. Nothing could have been more secure or peaceful, for Jim Crow was there, perched on a chair-back in the corner, half-asleep, and it was known that Jenny Lind was safely reposing in her stable, after a delightful day spent in doing next to nothing.
The fog had been lying about in thin trails across the sky for many hours, but had waited till night to mass its forces together into a thick blanket, white asa roll of cotton and as dense. The Light, so Father said, could hardly be seen a hundred yards from the tower, so the steam fog-signal had been started and was sending out its long shrieks of melancholy warning, “Dan—ger! Dan—ger-r-r! Keep awa-a-a-y! Keep a-w-a-a-a-a-y!”
It was well that the little family had its own resources on such a night, for though the Lighthouse tender brought letters and papers only once in two months, there were a number of well-selected books on hand and these could always be read and re-read. There was a Government cable, of course, to the mainland, but it was not supposed to be used save for danger, death, disaster, doctors, and drugs, and the longing for a daily paper could not be classed under any of these heads.
“A-a-a-a-h! A-a-a-a-h!” groaned the fog-signal and Mrs. McLean looked up from her work. “Did you happen to notice, Father,” she asked, “in the last ‘San Francisco Chronicle’ we had, that story about the eight-year-old boy out in Wyoming that an eagle tried to carry off?”
“Yes, I believe I spoke of it at the time. What makes you think of it now?”
“Why, because Stumpy read it, too, and he was saying when he was up here to-day that it was a ‘foolishness,’ as he called it, and no bird could carry such a weight.”
“Oh, that’s not so,” said Mr. McLean, decidedly, while the children dropped their checkers and pricked up their ears for a story. “I don’t know about a good-sized boy, but we know that an eagle could carry a small one. My idea is that they can lift as much in proportion to their weight as a hawk or a horned owl, and I’ve known a horned owl to snatch up a large house-cat and make off with it.
“My belief is that if hawks or owls can carry more than twice their weight—and everybody knows they can—that an eagle could do as much, or more, perhaps. Once, when I was a lad, I found an eagle lying helpless on his back in the road shot through the body with a rifle-ball, poor creature. I was kind of afraid of him, he looked so fierce, and I up-ended a long road skid and dropped it on him. Before it reached him he stretched up and caught it in his claws and held it up the length of his legs above him. I walked up on the skid and stood over him, and he easily held me and the skid, which I should judge would weigh more thantwenty pounds. I took pains to be weighed myself that same day and tipped the scales at one hundred and nineteen pounds. You tell Stumpy that, and tell him to put a stick in the claw of a wounded eagle and let him grasp a small tree with the other and a man must be stronger than ever I was to take the stick away from him.”
Ronald had left the table as soon as eagles, hawks, and horned owls had begun to fly through the conversation and now leaned on the arm of his father’s chair.
“I should think, Daddy,” he said in his wheedling way, “that it would be a good night to tell us that story about the baby that was carried off to Garrison Mountain when you were a little boy in Maine. I haven’t heard it, I do think, more’n once since I lived in this country.”
McLean laughed. “I’m no story-teller,” he said, “and a good thing I’m not. What with Stumpy and his tales and your mother there and her ballads, you children would never have learned to read if I’d told stories, too.”
“Never you mind about my ballads,” advised Mother, good-humoredly. “You like them just aswell as the children do. Tell the boy about the white-headed eagle. I’d like to hear it again, myself.”
“It was a good while ago it happened,” said McLean, “for it was not long after my father and mother died and I was brought over from the old country to an uncle on a farm in Maine.
“We knew that two old white-headed eagles built their nest every year on a crag of Garrison Mountain in plain sight of the folks in the valley and we heard them screaming over us every spring when they came back to settle down again in the old homestead. The charcoal-burners in the camps used to hear them, too, as they swooped down to the lowlands for rushes and grass to line their nest, and when the great eggs were laid and the mother was keeping them warm, many a lamb or little pig did the old father eagle take her for her dinner. Mothers used to be extra watchful of their babies for the first few weeks of spring, but nothing ever did happen and of course they thought nothing ever would.”
“Would an eagle really like a baby better than a lamb?” asked Lesley, fearfully.
“Why, no, of course not, child. It would only see something soft and light that might be good to eatand snatch it up. Well, one warm spring morning when the apple-trees were in bloom Mrs. Shadwell had set her baby boy out to play on the grass in the care of his sister, and had left him but a few moments when a shadow flew by the window; she heard the flapping of great wings, cries and calls of distress, and she rushed to the door just in time to see old Father Whitehead rise into the air with the baby in his claws. There was nothing to do but to scream and scream and to snatch the big dinner-horn and blow blast after blast upon it to summon her husband and the charcoal-burners.
“The neighbors gathered in a few moments and plainly saw the giant bird with the white bundle in his grasp circling toward his nest. It was dreadful to see the agony of the parents and to hear the mother cry, ‘Oh, they’ll tear my Willie to pieces. Oh, save him, save him!’
“But how were they to save him? Many a time had the best marksmen of the settlement tried to shoot the robber pair, but never had succeeded, and it would be a terrible risk now to try and hit the old bird while he carried the child in his grasp. Fortunately an old hunter—‘Dave,’ they called him; I never knew hisother name—had lately come to the settlement from the North woods where he had been trapping sable. Luckily, he heard the horn-blast on the hills and knew it meant danger of some kind.
“Reaching the valley, he saw the great bird overhead with his white burden, saw the crowd of neighbors, and judged what had happened.
“He loaded his long rifle, ran toward the bridge where he could get a better view of the eagles’ nest, leveled his piece on the rail and knelt on the planking. The father followed him begging him to be careful, to be careful, or he would kill the child, but old Dave waved his hand for silence, watched the eagle as he soared upward and the mother bird circling and screaming over the nest—and waited!
“I was only a boy, but I shall never forget the fright and the suspense in the eyes of the neighbors while they waited for Dave’s shot. It was a long range and the bullets fired by the best marksmen in the village had always failed to reach it, hitherto.
“Would the old hunter have better success? Could he kill the bird and not the child?
“At length the eagle slowly descended to the nest where his young ones were clamoring for their dinnerand, just as he reached the rocky platform on which it was built, Dave fired.
“We held our breaths, but before the smoke from his rifle had disappeared the head of the mighty bird was seen to fall. Dave waved his hand again for silence and leveled his piece a second time, for the mother was slowly circling down to see what was amiss in the nest. The old man was a wonderful marksman, the best I shall ever see, for he fired again just at the very moment when she was stretching out her feet to alight and in a second we saw her tumble down the side of the crag.”
“Oh, that was splendid!” cried Ronald, his eyes sparkling with excitement, “and then the poor mother knew that her baby was safe.”
“Not at all,” answered McLean. “She knew nothing of the kind, and none of us did. How did she know but the young eagles were big enough to tear the child to pieces? How did she know he would not toss about and roll over the cliff?
“No, the thing was to get him out of the nest, and to do that they had to climb a crag that nobody had ever gone up, not the best man in the settlement. And they wouldn’t have done it then, if it hadn’t beenfor old Dave. I was one that helped the men carry the ladders and the ropes to the foot of the crag. I saw them climb as far as they could get a foothold and then set a ladder up into a gnarled oak that grew out of the rocks above. Dave climbed to the oak, pulled up the ladder and set it still farther up, lashing it to the oak-tree, while Shadwell—the baby’s father, you know—clambered after him on another ladder the men had brought. He followed Dave till they found a part of the cliff where they could climb without ladders, and then, holding on by tough shrubs that grew here and there, they dragged themselves up to the top of the crag.
“But then, you see, they were too high up and old Dave had to rope the father and lower him down to the nest which was built on a kind of rocky platform below.”
“Oh, the poor mother!” sighed Mrs. McLean, “not knowing all that time whether the child was alive or dead!”
“They very soon knew,” said her husband, “for when the father found the child alive and unhurt, he held it up for us all to see, and then, what a shout went up from the valley!”
“But how did they get the baby down?” questioned Ronald.
“Much the same way as Stumpy got you down from the rock the other day; they roped him and lowered him into the arms of the men who were waiting at the foot of the first ladder and there were plenty of arms and good, strong ones too.
“Oh, it was a wonderful sight. I never shall forget it, though I haven’t thought of it for years, and shouldn’t have now, if your mother hadn’t read that story in the ‘Chronicle.’”
“Do you think,” Lesley asked her mother wistfully, “if the little sister had been watching the baby, that maybe the eagle wouldn’t have carried it off?”
“That I can’t say,” answered her mother, briskly; “an eagle is a good-sized bird to fight, but Icansay that it’s past time for you two to be in bed!”
Lesley did not fall asleep as quickly as usual that night, and when at last she drowsed she awoke with a sudden start and a beating heart. What had frightened her? She did not know, but she tiptoed to the window to see if the fog had lifted and found that allwas clear and the Light shining bravely across the waters. The door between her brother’s room and her own was always left open at night, for she had had a care of him ever since he was a baby and she glanced through it as she went back to bed. She stopped in amaze, for there was no dark head on the pillow there. Where was Ronnie? She was in the room in a minute, and looking in the closet, under the bed, in the corners, then back in her own room where perhaps the boy might be hiding and trying to frighten her. No, no Ronnie there.
She ran to her mother’s door with a cry, and Mrs. McLean, hearing, lifted her head to say, “What is it, Lesley? Are you sick?”
“No, Mother, but I can’t find Ronnie,” with a little gasp of fear.
“Not find Ronnie!”—and in a moment Mrs. McLean had hurried on slippers and an old shawl and was in her boy’s room. In another moment Malcolm was there, too, gathering some clothing about him as he came, and together they looked in every likely and unlikely place upstairs. Then Malcolm hurried to the floor below, calling back that every door was shut and bolted on the inside.
“The cellar!” cried Mrs. McLean, but no, that door was also closed and bolted.
“He must be in the tower, then,” exclaimed Father, hurrying to the second floor again, and Lesley and her mother followed him as he ran up the corkscrew stairs to the Light.
All was peaceful there; the lamp blazed like a splendid sun and the speckless glass protected it from all wandering breezes. All was peaceful, but the little door in the masonry was open and the three dived through it into the gallery that ran around the tower.
“Hush!” whispered Mrs. McLean, “don’t speak to him! He’s walking in his sleep.”
That is just what the boy was doing, in fact—walking on the gallery in his little white nightgown, his eyes fast closed, as calmly as if he had been at play on the grass.
“Get behind him, quietly, Malcolm,” whispered Mrs. McLean again, “so that he won’t fall, but don’t speak to him now. Let him alone and perhaps he’ll come in, himself.”
They watched silently as Ronald came toward them, went back again and then, with arms outstretched, seemed trying to climb the tower, still withfast-closed eyes. Half-clothed and shivering in the night air, they watched him make this attempt three times and then pass them by, totally unconscious of their presence, slip in through the little door, and make his way downstairs to bed.
The boy did not waken even when his mother wrapped the blankets more closely about him, but slept on sweetly while the watchers hung above his bed.
“Has he ever walked in his sleep before, Lesley?” asked Malcolm, anxiously.
“No, Father, no; I never saw such a thing. He always talks in his sleep a lot, you know, but he doesn’t get up.”
“It’s likely he won’t remember anything about this in the morning, Lesley, and we’ll tell him when he comes downstairs,” said Mother. “I’ll fasten his door now and then we’ll get some sleep. Thank Heaven, we found him in time!”
In the morning when his astonishing feat had been related to Ronald, he only half-believed it until the evidence of three pairs of eyes was brought forward.
“What were you trying to do, Ronnie?” asked Lesley, curiously—“trying to climb up the tower?”
“Oh, I remember!” cried the boy, “I remember now. It was a dream I had and I was climbing up a rock to reach an eagle’s nest.”
“Then, in future,” said his father, good-humoredly, “as you seem determined to climb by night as well as by day, you will please tie a string to your toe when you go to bed and hitch the other end of it to Lesley’s bedpost. Then, at least, you’ll have a companion when you start on your midnight rambles.”