Jewel's Story Book Part 47

"Your house is splendid and safe, isn't it, Johnnie?"

"Yes, it is."

"I wonder where we'd better lie down," pursued Chips. "I'm sleepy. Let's play we're Crusoe and Friday now."

"Oh, we can't," responded Johnnie impatiently, "not with so many com--" he was going to say comforts, but changed his mind.

The night was very dark, not a twinkling star peeped down at the children, and the naked branches of the climbing roses rattled against the pillars to which they were nailed, for the wind was rising.

The boys sat down on the steps and Chips edged closer to his companion. "I think it was queer actions in my mother," he said, "to leave me here without any shawl or pillow or anything."

A little chill crept over Johnnie's head from sleepiness and cold. "Our mothers don't care what happens to us," he replied gloomily. The stillness of the house and the growing lateness of the hour combined to make him feel that if being wrecked was more uncomfortable than this, he could, after all, be happy without it.

"What do you think?" broke in the s.h.i.+vering Man Friday. "Mamma says ham isn't good to eat if it isn't cooked."

"And that's the meanest old hen that ever lived!" returned Crusoe. "She hasn't laid an egg since I got her."

A distant rumble sounded in the air. "What's that?" asked Chips.

"Well, I should think you'd know that's thunder," replied Johnnie crossly.

"Oh, yes," said little Chips meekly, "and we're going to get wet."

They were both quiet for another minute, while the wind rose and swept by them.

"I really think, Johnnie," began Chips apologetically, "that I'm not big enough to be a good Man Friday. I think to-morrow you'd better find somebody else."

"No, indeed," replied Johnnie feelingly. "I'd rather give up being wrecked than go off with any one but you. If you give up, I shall."

The rain began to patter down.

"If you don't like to get wet, Chips, I'd just as lieves go and ring the bell as not," he added.

A sudden sweep of wind nearly tipped the children over, for they had risen, undecidedly.

"No," called Chips stoutly, to be heard above the blast. "I'll be Friday till to-morrow." His last word sounded like a shout, for the wind suddenly died.

"What do you scream so for?" asked Johnnie impatiently; but the storm had only paused, as it were to get ready, and now approached swiftly, gathering strength as it came. It swept across the piazza, taking the children's breath away and bending the tall maple in front of the house with such sudden fury that a branch snapped off; then the wind died in the distance with a rus.h.i.+ng sound and the breaking tree was illumined by a flash of lightning.

"I think, Johnnie," said Chips unsteadily, "that G.o.d wants us to go in the house."

A peal of thunder roared. "I've just thought," replied Johnnie, keeping his balance by clutching the younger boy as tightly as Chips was clinging to him, "that perhaps it wasn't right for us to run off the way we did, without getting any advice."

They strove with the wind only a few seconds more, then, with one accord, struggled to the door where one rang peal after peal at the bell, while the other pounded st.u.r.dily.

Johnnie didn't stop then to wonder how his father could get downstairs to open the door so quickly. Mrs. Ford, too, seemed to have been waiting for the pair of heroes, and she took them straight to Johnnie's room, where she undressed them in silence and rolled them into bed. They said their prayers and were asleep in two minutes, while the storm howled outside. Then, in some mysterious way, Mrs. Wood came into the room, and the three parents stood watching the unconscious children.

"That's the last of one trial with those boys, I'm sure," said Mr. Ford, laughing, and he was right; for it was years before any one heard either Johnnie or Chips mention Robinson Crusoe or his Man Friday.

CHAPTER XV

ST. VALENTINE

After that day when, on the lee side of the sand-dune the Evringham family read together the story of Johnnie and Chips, it was some time before the last tale in the story book was called for.

The farmhouse where they boarded stood near a pond formed by the rus.h.i.+ng in of the sea during some change in the sands of the beach, so here was still another water playmate for Jewel.

"I do hope," said Mr. Evringham meditatively, on the first morning that he and Jewel stood together on its green bank, "I do hope that very particular housekeeper, Nature, will let this pond alone until we go!"

Jewel looked up at his serious face with the lines between the eyes. "She wouldn't touch this great big pond, would she?" she asked.

"Ho! Wouldn't she? Well, I guess so."

"But," suggested Jewel, lifting her shoulders, "she's too busy in summer in the ravines and everywhere."

"Oh," Mr. Evringham nodded his head knowingly. "Nature looks out for everything."

"Grandpa!" Jewel's eyes were intent. "Would she ask Summer to touch this great big pond? What would she want to do it for?"

"Oh, more house-cleaning, I suppose."

The child chuckled as she looked out across the blue waves, rippling in the wind and white-capped here and there, "When you know it's washed all the _time_, grandpa," she responded. "The waves are just scrubbing it now.

Can't you see?"

"Yes," the broker nodded gravely. "No doubt that is why she has to empty it so seldom. Sometimes she lets it go a very long time; but then the day comes when she begins to think it over, and to calculate how much sediment and one thing and another there is in the bottom of that pond; and at last she says, 'Come now, out it must go!'"

"But how can she get it out, how?" asked Jewel keenly interested. "The brooks are all running somewhere, but the pond doesn't. How can she dip it out? It would take Summer's hottest sun a year!"

"Yes, indeed, Nature is too clever to try that. The winds are her servants, you know, and they understand their business perfectly; so when she says 'That pond needs to be cleaned out,' they merely get up a storm some night after everybody's gone to bed. The people have seen the pond fine and full when the sun went down. All that night the wind howls and the windows rattle and the trees bend and switch around; and if those in the farmhouse, instead of being in bed, were over there on the beach," the speaker waved his hand toward the s.h.i.+ning white sand, distant, but in plain sight, "they might see countless billows working for dear life to dig a trench through the hard sand. The wind sends one tremendous wave after another to help them, and as a great roller breaks and recedes, all the little crested waves scrabble with might and main, pulling at the softened sand, until, after hours of this labor, the cut is made completely through from sea to pond."

Mr. Evringham looked down and met the unwinking gaze fixed upon him. "Then why--why," asked Jewel, "when the big rollers keep coming, doesn't the pond get filled fuller than ever?"

The broker lifted his forefinger toward his face with a long drawn "Ah-h!

Nature is much too clever for _that_. She may not have gone to college, but she understands engineering, all the same. All this is accomplished just at the right moment for the outgoing tide to pull at the pond with a mighty hand. Well,"--pausing dramatically,--"you can imagine what happens when the deep cut is finished."

"Does the pond have to go, grandpa?"

"It just does, and in a hurry!"

"Is it sorry, do you think?" asked Jewel doubtfully.

"We-ell, I don't know that I ever thought of that side of it; but you can imagine the feelings of the people in the farmhouse, who went to bed beside the ripples of a smiling little lake, and woke to find themselves near a great empty bog."

Jewel thought and sighed deeply. "Well," she said, at last, "I hope Nature will wait till we're gone. I love this pond."