CHAPTER IXTHE FORT BUILDERS
“Isthat your dog?” Sunny Boy asked Ellen curiously.
“She isn’t anybody’s dog,” declared Ellen seriously. “At least, not really. Queen did belong to Dr. Maynard over in the town, but she learned to ride on the trolley cars, and now she won’t stay at home. Every summer she’s down on the beach all day, playing.”
“But dogs get hungry,” protested Sunny. “An’ where can she sleep?”
“She sleeps most anywhere,” said Ellen, who was spending her third summer in Nestle Cove and really knew Queen very well indeed. “Sometimes she sleeps on our frontporch. And my mother always feeds her if she acts hungry. All the people in the cottages know Queen.”
“Here’s a shell for you, Sunny,” announced Ralph, who had been running up the beach looking for one. “Let’s start the fort right here in this corner. You mark how it goes, Stephen.”
Stephen knew all about forts. He had a big brother who was an officer in the regular army, and he lived in forts, just as more ordinary people live in houses.
“First you have a wall,” said Stephen. “You can begin on that, Ellen. Oh, ’way off! There, that’s about right. And Sunny Boy and Ralph and me will make a great big fort, big enough to get into.”
To measure the height of their fort, they used one of the old pilings left from the pier that had burned and had never been rebuilt, and then they began to heap up the sand. If Stephen had only known it, what theywere building looked far more like an Eskimo’s hut than it did a fort, but that didn’t matter as long as the builders were satisfied.
“Now what do you think of that?” Stephen stood off to admire their work. “I wish Aunt Hallie would hurry up and come and see it.”
“Isn’t the wall nice?” asked Ellen, who had been working every minute to finish her part of the task. “It’s just as smooth! Feel, Stephen.”
“Yes, that’s great,” approved Stephen. “Want to see how it looks inside, Sunny? Stoop down, and don’t hit your head anywhere, or you’ll knock it down.”
Sunny Boy crawled carefully through the doorway of the fort. It was hollowed out inside to make a little room. He was half way in and half way out when he heard Ellen exclaim: “Look what Queen has in her mouth! Do you suppose she got it out of the water?”
Sunny Boy crawled carefully through the doorway of the fortPage119
Sunny Boy crawled carefully through the doorway of the fortPage119
Sunny Boy crawled carefully through the doorway of the fort
Page119
Sunny was curious to know what Queen had, and he attempted to back out hastily to see. He forgot that the doorway wasn’t very high, and when he stood up, bump! went his yellow head, and down about him tumbled the sand fort.
“Now you’ve done it!” scolded Stephen, as Sunny Boy’s feet waved wildly in the air. “Hurry up and dig, Ralph, he’ll choke!”
Ralph and Ellen dug frantically with clam shells and spades, but they had dug a deeper hole than they knew, and Sunny Boy was really buried under a heavy load of sand.
“Take the pail,” ordered Stephen, who was older than Ralph or Ellen, and able to realize that Sunny Boy might be in danger. “Ellen, you go and get—” Stephen shaded his eyes with his hand and looked up the beach. “You go and get the life-saver’s rake,” he told her.
Every morning, when the life-saverscleaned up the beach, they used long-handled wooden rakes. Usually they put these away in lockers under the pier, but Stephen’s quick eyes had seen a rake left out to-day and thrust carelessly under the piling. The two life-savers were far out beyond the breakers now, in a rowboat, watching the bathers.
“I got it!” Ellen came racing back with the rake. “Let me rake Sunny out, Stephen.”
“You’re too little. Let go,” said Stephen. He began to claw at the sand fort vigorously.
“Here come Mother and Mrs. Horton,” announced Ellen, just as Stephen and Ralph together succeeded in uncovering Sunny Boy.
Sunny Boy sat up, rather frightened and extremely uncomfortable. There was sand in his yellow hair, sand in his eyes, and sand in his mouth.
“Ugh!” he spluttered. “Ugh! I couldn’t see a thing. I couldn’t even breathe!”
“Why, Sunny Boy, what happened to you?” asked his mother wonderingly. “This is Ellen and Ralph’s mother, dear.”
Mrs. Gray smiled down at Sunny. She was very tall and had gray hair. Sunny Boy held out his hand to her.
“You got rather the worst of it, didn’t you?” she said to him. “I think you must have pulled the sand house down upon you. But a swim will fix you up. Your mother tells me you are going in to-day.”
“Aunt Bessie is waiting for you at the house,” Mrs. Horton told Sunny Boy. “She and Aunt Betty are going in bathing this morning. They’ll look after you. I mean to sit here and sew with Mrs. Gray and watch you.”
Sunny Boy turned to trot off to the bungalow, but came back.
“What did Queen have?” he asked curiously.
“An orange,” answered Ellen promptly. “I guess she stole it from some one’s lunch box.”
Aunt Bessie was sitting on the porch knitting, a raincoat thrown over her bathing suit.
“I’m going in swimming with you, Aunt Bessie. Sha’n’t we have fun? Where’s my bathing suit?” cried the excited Sunny Boy.
“Your mother left your suit in the house to the left,” she informed her nephew. “Want any help, dear?”
“I can undress all right,” Sunny Boy reminded her reproachfully. “I don’t take time ’cept when I’m getting dressed.”
Aunt Betty, it seemed, could “swim like a fish” as Aunt Bessie admiringly admitted.
“Let her hold you, Sunny Boy,” she urged her little nephew. “You’ll learn to swim right away if you’re not afraid.”
Sunny Boy wasn’t afraid, not the least bit. Aunt Betty said she would teach him how to float first, and she carried him out to where the water was smoother and put him on his back just as though she were putting him down on his own soft bed.
“Just keep your head up a bit,” she told him. “Never mind if the water does come over your chin—there. I won’t let go, I’m holding you firmly, dear. Now isn’t that fun?”
Sunny Boy agreed that it was. He tried floating several times, and then Aunt Betty carried him back to the beach and he sat down comfortably and let the waves roll over him.
“You’re having a beautiful time,” said Mother’s voice behind him. She had come up and he had not heard her footsteps in the soft sand. “I want you to go in and get dressed now, dear. Why, you’re getting sunburned already.”
Sunny Boy did not want to go in. He wanted to stay and play longer in the water. He scuffled his bare feet impatiently, and a little frown grew on his forehead.
“Why, Sunny Boy!” Mother’s voice was distinctly surprised. “Here Daddy left you to look after me, and you make a fuss the very first thing I ask you to do. What do you suppose he would say to that?”
“I’m going,” announced Sunny Boy, scrambling to his feet. “I’m going this minute, Mother. Can I have a cracker?”
“‘May I have a cracker?’” corrected Mrs. Horton. “Well, just one. We’re going to have an early lunch.”
“All right. Then I’ll tell Harriet just one cracker.”
Sunny Boy ran over the hot sand, up to the bathhouse, and rubbed so hard with the rough towels that he was as dry and clean as could be in the shortest possible time.He put on his sailor suit and went to his room to brush his hair.
“Mother says I may have one cracker, please,” he reported to Harriet, whom he found setting the table in the dining-room.
“’Tis a pink nose, you have,” Harriet told him frankly. “Never mind, you’ll be brown as a berry before your father comes down Saturday. Here’s your cracker now.”
Sunny Boy ran down again to the beach and had time to help Ellen and Ralph build a schoolhouse in the sand before Mrs. Horton and the two aunts—for Aunt Betty had not stayed in the water many minutes after Sunny Boy came out—gathered up their magazines and sewing and started back to the bungalow for lunch.
“Sunny Boy,” said Mother at the table—and, by the way, Sunny Boy sat in Daddy’s place when he wasn’t there and tried his best to behave as the man of the house should—“if you take a nap this afternoon, you maysit up to-night for a couple of hours and go with us down on the beach.”
Now, Sunny Boy was not fond of taking naps, and since his fifth birthday he had been gradually skipping them, since Mother thought that if a laddie went to bed early every night and was not cross during the day he might manage nicely without sleeping in the afternoon. A cross boy needed a nap—that was what Mother always said.
“Well, Mother,” answered Sunny slowly, “I don’t feel sleepy—I don’t suppose I could go ’less I took a nap?”
“No, indeed,” answered Mother. “No nap means you go to bed at a quarter of seven as usual.”
“All right,” agreed Sunny Boy, with a long breath. “I’ll go and take a nap.”
He went into his room very much like a soldier going to war. We’re sorry to say he kicked off his shoes—one of them wentflying across the pretty room and landed on a chair and the other went under the bed. Then, dressed as he was, Sunny flung himself on the bed.
“Can’t go to sleep right in the day-time,” he grumbled to himself. “I’ll bet Ralph doesn’t take naps.”
But Sunny Boy didn’t know that plenty of salt air and an ocean bath and much running about on a sandy beach can make a small boy sleepy even against his will; in the middle of a big yawn, Sunny went to sleep.
When he woke, he heard his mother moving about in the next room. He felt hot and uncomfortable, the way one feels, you know, when the eyes first open after a nap. When you’re a baby you cry, but when you are older, if you don’t watch out, you’re cross. Sunny Boy felt cross.
“Hello!” his mother lifted the door curtainand smiled at him. “I heard you turn over, dear. Supper will be ready in a few minutes.”
Sunny Boy sat up in bed.
“Supper!” he echoed. “Why, Mother, is it night?”
“It’s nearly six,” Mrs. Horton told him. “You’ve had a fine long nap. Now I’ll help you wash, dear, and when you get into a fresh suit you’ll begin to feel happier. And then I’ll tell you what fun we are going to have to-night.”