They found the raft as they had left it, except that petals of the may-bloom, shaken from the hawthorn bushes by the breeze, as they came floating down the stream had lodged against the vessel like a white line on the water. Already, too, the roach, which love a broad shadow to play about its edge, had come underneath, but when they felt the shaking of the bank from the footsteps turned aside, and let the current drift them down. Bevis fetched his hatchet from the Peninsula and began to hack at the willow; Mark, not without some difficulty, got leave to climb into the raft, and sit in the centre. The chips flew, some fell on the grass, some splashed into the brook; Bevis made a broad notch just as he had seen the men do it; and though his arm was slender, the fire behind it drove the edge of the steel into the wood. The willow shook, and its branches, which touched the water, ruffled the surface.
But though the trunk was hollow it was a long way through, and when Bevis began to tire he had only cut in about three inches. Then Mark had to work, but before he had given ten strokes Bevis said it was of no use chopping, they could never do it, they must get the grub-axe. So they went back to the house, and carried the ungainly tool down to the tree.
It was too cumbrous for them, they pocked up a little turf, and just disturbed the earth, and then threw the clumsy thing on the grass. Next they thought of the great saw—the cross-cut—the men used, one at each end, to saw though timber; but that was out of their reach, purposely put up high in the workshop, so that they should not meddle with it or cut themselves with its terrible teeth.
“I know,” said Mark, “we must make a fire, and burn the tree; we are savages, you know, and that is how they do it.”
“How silly you are!” said Bevis. “We are not savages, and I shall not play at that. We have just discovered this river, and we are going down it on our raft; and if we do not reach some place to-night and build a fort, very likely the savages will shoot us. I believe I heard one shouting just now; there was something rustled, I am sure, in the forest.”
He pointed at the thick double-mound hedge about a hundred yards distant.
“What river is it?” said Mark. “Is it the Amazon, or the Congo, or the Yellow River, or the Nile—”
“It is the Mississippi, of course,” said Bevis, quite decided and at ease as to that point. “Can’t you see that piece of weed there. My papa says that weed came from America, so I am sure it is the Mississippi, and nobody has ever floated down it before, and there’s no one that can read within a thousand miles.”
“Then what shall we do?”
“O, there’s always something you can do. If we could only get a beaver now to nibble through it. There’s always something you can do. I know,” and Bevis jumped up delighted at his idea, “we can bore a hole, and blow it up with gunpowder!”
“Lot us fetch an auger,” said Mark. “The gimlet is not big enough.”
“Be quick,” said Bevis. “Run back to the settlement, and get the auger; I will mind the raft and keep off the savages; and, I say, bring a spear and the cutlass; and—I say—”
But Mark was too far, and in too much of a hurry to hear a word. Bevis, tired of chopping, rolled over on his back on the grass, looking up at the sky. The buttercups rose high above his head, the wind blew and cooled his heated forehead, and a humble-bee hummed along: borne by the breeze from the grass there came the sweet scent of green things growing in the sunshine. Far up he saw the swallows climbing in the air; they climbed a good way almost straight up, and then suddenly came slanting down again.
While he lay there he distinctly heard the Indians rustling again in the forest. He raised himself on one arm, but could not see them; then recollecting that he must try to conceal himself, he reclined again, and thought how he should be able to repel an attack without weapons. There was the little hatchet, he could snatch up that and defend himself. Perhaps they would sink the raft? Perhaps when Mark returned they had better tow it back up stream, and draw it ashore safely at home, and then return to the work of clearing the obstruction. As he lay with his knees up among the buttercups he heard the thump, thump of Mark’s feet rushing down the hill in eager haste with the auger. So he sat up, and beckoned to him to be quiet, and explained to him when he arrived that the Indians were certainly about. They must tow the raft back to the drinking-place. Bevis untied the cord with which the raft was fastened to the willow, and stepped on board.
“Don’t pull too quick,” he said to Mark, giving him the cord; “or perhaps I shall run aground.”
“But you floated down,” said Mark. “Let me get in, and you tow; it’s my turn.”
“Your turn?” shouted Bevis, standing up as straight as a bolt. “This is my raft.”
“But you always have everything, and you floated down, and I have not; you have everything, and—”
“You are a great story,” said Bevis, stamping so that the raft shook and the ripples rushed from under it. “I don’t have everything, and you have more than half; and I gave you my engine and that box of gun-caps yesterday; and I hate you, and you are a big story.”
Out he scrambled, and seizing Mark by the shoulders, thrust him towards the raft with such force that it was with difficulty Mark saved himself from falling into the brook. He clung to the willow—the bark gave way under his fingers—but as he slipped, he slung himself over the raft and dropped on it.
“Take the pole,” said Bevis, still very angry, and looking black as thunder. “Take the pole, and steer so as not to run in the mud, and not to hit against the bank. Now then,” and putting the cord over his shoulder, off he started.
Mark had as much as ever he could do to keep the raft from striking one side or the other.
“Please don’t go so fast,” he said.
Bevis went slower, and towed steadily in silence. After they had passed the hawthorn under the may-bloom, Mark said, “Bevis,” but Bevis did not answer.
“Bevis,” repeated Mark, “I have had enough now; stop, and you get in.”
“I shall not,” said Bevis. “You are a great story.”
In another minute Mark spoke again:—
“Let me get out and tow you now.” Bevis did not reply. “I say—I say—I say, Bevis.”
No use. Bevis towed him the whole way, till the raft touched the shallow shore of the drinking-place. Then Mark got out and helped him drag the vessel well up on the ground, so that it should not float away.
“Now,” said Bevis, after it was quite done. “Will you be a story any more?”
“No,” said Mark, “I will not be a story again.”
So they walked back side by side to the willow tree; Mark, who was really in the right, feeling in the wrong. At the tree Bevis picked up the auger, and told him to bore the hole. Mark began, but suddenly stopped.
“What’s the good of boring the hole when we have not got any gunpowder,” said he.
“No more we have,” said Bevis. “This is very stupid, and they will not let me have any, though I have got some money, and I have a great mind to buy some and hide it. Just as if we did not know how to use powder, and as if we did not know how to shoot! Oh, I know! We will go and cut a bough of alder—there’s ever so many alders by the Longpond—and burn it and make charcoal; it makes the best charcoal, you know, and they always—use it for gunpowder, and then we can get some saltpetre. Let me see—”
“The Bailiff had some saltpetre the other day,” said Mark.
“So he did: it is in the dairy. Oh yes, and I know where some sulphur is. It is in the garden-house, where the tools are, in the orchard; it’s what they use to smother the bees with—”
“That’s on brown paper,” said Mark; “that won’t do.”
“No it’s not. You have to melt it to put it on paper, and dip the paper in. This is in a piece, it is like a short bar, and we will pound it up and mix; them all together and make capital gunpowder.”
“Hurrah!” cried Mark, throwing down the auger. “Let’s go and cut the alder. Come on!”
“Stop,” said Bevis. “Lean on me, and walk slow. Don’t you know you have caught a dreadful fever, from being in the swamps by the river, and you can hardly walk, and you are very thin and weak? Lean on my arm and hang your head.”
Mark hung his head, turning his rosy cheeks down to the buttercups, and dragged his sturdy fever-stricken limbs along with an effort.
“Humph!” said a gruff voice.
“It’s the Indians!” cried Bevis, startled; for they were so absorbed they had not heard the Bailiff come up behind them. They quite jumped, as if about to be scalped.
“What be you doing to that tree?” said the Bailiff.
“Find out,” said Bevis. “It’s not your tree: and why don’t you say when you’re coming?”
“I saw you from the hedge,” said the Bailiff. “I was telling John where to cut the bushes from for the new harrow.” That caused the rustling in the forest. “You’ll never chop he down.”
“That we shall, if we want to.”
“No, you won’t—he stops your ship.”
“It isn’t a ship: it’s a raft.”
“Well, you can’t get by.”
“That we can.”
“I thinks you be stopped,” said the Bailiff, having now looked at the tree more carefully. “He be main thick,”—with a certain sympathy for stolid, inanimate obstruction.
“I tell you, people like us are never stopped by anything,” said Bevis. “We go through forests, and we float down rivers, and we shoot tigers, and move the biggest trees ever seen—don’t we, Mark?”
“Yes, that we do: nothing is anything to us.”
“Of course not,” said Bevis. “And if we can’t chop it down or blow it up, as we mean to, then we dig round it. O, Mark, I say! I forgot! Let’s dig a canal round it.”
“How silly we were never to think of that!” said Mark. “A canal is the very thing—from here to the creek.”
He meant where the stream curved to enclose the Peninsula: the proposed canal would make the voyage shorter.
“Cut some sticks—quick!” said Bevis. “We must plug out our canal—that is what they always do first, whether it is a canal, or a railway, or a drain, or anything. And I must draw a plan. I must get my pocket-book and pencil. Come on, Mark, and get the spade while I get my pencil.”
Off they ran. The Bailiff leaned on his hazel staff, one hand against the willow, and looked down into the water, as calmly as the sun itself reflected there. When he had looked awhile he shook his head and grunted: then he stumped away; and after a dozen yards or so, glanced back, grunted, and shook his head again. It could not be done. The tree was thick, the earth hard—no such thing: his sympathy, in a dull unspoken way, was with the immovable.
Mark went to work with the spade, throwing the turf he dug up into the brook; while Bevis, lying at full length on the grass, drew his plan of the canal. He drew two curving lines parallel, and half an inch apart, to represent the bend of the brook, and then two, as straight as he could manage, across, so as to shorten the distance, and avoid the obstruction. The rootlets of the grass held tight, when Mark tried to lift the spadeful he had dug, so that he could not tear them off.
He had to chop them at the side with his spade first, and then there was a root of the willow in the way; a very obstinate stout root, for which the little hatchet had to be brought to cut it. Under the softer turf the ground was very hard, as it had long been dry, so that by the time Bevis had drawn his plan and stuck in little sticks to show the course the canal was to take, Mark had only cleared about a foot square, and four or five inches deep, just at the edge of the bank, where he could thrust it into the stream.
“I have been thinking,” said Bevis as he came back from the other end of the line, “I have been thinking what we are, now we are making this canal?”
“Yes,” said Mark, “what are we?—they do not make canals on the Mississippi. Is this the Suez canal?”
“Oh no,” said Bevis. “This is not Africa; there is no sand, and there are no camels about. Stop a minute. Put down that spade, don’t dig another bit till we know what we are.”
Mark put down the spade, and they both thought very hard indeed, looking straight at one another.
“I know,” said Bevis, drawing a long breath. “We are digging a canal through Mount Athos, and we are Greeks.”
“But was it the Greeks?” said Mark. “Are you sure—”
“Quite sure,” said Bevis. “Perfectly quite sure. Besides, it doesn’t matter. We can do it if they did not, don’t you see?”
“So we can: and who are you then, if we are Greeks?”
“I am Alexander the Great.”
“And who am I!”
“O, you—you are anybody.”
“But I must be somebody,” said Mark, “else it will not do.”
“Well, you are: let me see—Pisistratus.”
“Who was Pisistratus?”
“I don’t know,” said Bevis. “It doesn’t matter in the least. Now dig.”
Pisistratus dug till he came to another root, which Alexander the Great chopped off for him with the hatchet. Pisistratus dug again and uncovered a water-rat’s hole which went down aslant to the water. They both knelt on the grass, and peered down the round tunnel: at the bottom where the water was, some of the fallen petals of the may-bloom had come in and floated there.
“This would do splendidly to put some gunpowder in and blow up, like the miners do,” said Bevis. “And I believe that is the proper way to make a canal: it is how they make tunnels, I am sure.”
“Greeks are not very good,” said Mark. “I don’t like Greeks: don’t let’s be Greeks any longer. The Mississippi was very much best.”
“So it was,” said Bevis. “The Mississippi is the nicest. I am not Alexander, and you are not Pisistratus. This is the Mississippi.”
“Let us have another float down,” said Mark. “Let me float down, and I will drag you all the way up this time.”
“All right,” said Bevis.
So they launched the raft, and Mark got in and floated down, and Bevis walked on the bank, giving him directions how to pilot the vessel, which as before was brought up by the willow leaning over the water. Just as they were preparing to tow it back again, and Bevis was climbing out on the willow to get into the raft they heard a splashing down the brook.
“What’s that?” said Mark. “Is it Indians?”
“No, it’s an alligator. At least, I don’t know. Perhaps it’s a canoe full of Indians. Give me the pole, quick; there now, take the hatchet. Look out!”
The splashing increased; then there was a “Yowp!” and Pan, the spaniel, suddenly appeared out of the flags by the osier-bed. He raced across the ground there, and jumped into the brook again, and immediately a moorcock, which he had been hunting, scuttled along the water, beating with his wings, and scrambling with his long legs hanging down, using both air and water to fly from his enemy. As he came near he saw Bevis on the willow, and rose out of the brook over the bank. Bevis hit at him with his pole, but missed; and Mark hurled the hatchet in vain. The moorcock flew straight across the meadow to another withy-bed, and then disappeared. It was only by threats that they stopped the spaniel from following.
Pan having got his plateful by patiently waiting about the doorway, after he had licked his chops, and turned up the whites of his eyes, to see if he could persuade them to give him any more, walked into the rick-yard, and choosing a favourite spot upon some warm straw—for straw becomes quite hot under sunshine—lay down and took a nap. When he awoke, having settled matters with the fleas, he strolled back to the ha-ha wall, and, seeing Bevis and Mark still busy by the brook, went down to know what they were doing. But first going to a place he well knew to lap he scented the moorcock, and gave chase.
“Come here,” said Bevis; and, seizing the spaniel by the skin of his neck, he dragged him in the raft, stepped in quickly after, and held Pan while Mark hauled at the tow-line. But when Bevis had to take the pole to guide the raft from striking the bank Pan jumped out in a moment, preferring to swim rather than to ride in comfort, nor could any persuasions or threats get him on again. He barked along the shore, while Mark hauled and Bevis steered the craft.
Having beached her at the drinking-place on the shelving strand, they thought they had better go up the river a little way, and see if there were any traces of Indians; and, following the windings of the stream, they soon came to the hatch. Above the hatch the water was smooth, as it usually is where it is deep and approaching the edge, and Bevis’s quick eye caught sight of a tiny ripple there near one bank, so tiny that it hardly extended across the brook, and disappeared after the third wavelet.
“Keep Pan there!” he said. “Hit him—hit him harder than that; he doesn’t mind.”
Mark punched the spaniel, who crouched; but, nevertheless, his body crept, as it were, towards the hatch, where Bevis was climbing over. Bevis took hold of the top rail, put his foot on the rail below, all green and slippery with weeds where the water splashed, like the rocks where the sea comes, then his other foot further along, and so got over with the deep water in front, and the roar of the fall under, and the bubbles rushing down the stream. The bank was very steep, but there was a notch to put the foot in, and a stout hawthorn stem—the thorns on which had long since been broken off for the purpose—gave him something to hold to and by which to lift himself up.
Then he walked stealthily along the bank—it overhung the dark deep water, and seemed about to slip in under him. There was a plantation of trees on that side, and on the other a hawthorn hedge, so that it was a quiet and sheltered spot. As he came to the place where he had seen the ripple, he looked closer, and in among a bunch of rushes, with the green stalks standing up all round it, he saw a moorhen’s nest. It was made of rushes, twined round like a wreath, or perhaps more like a large green turban, and there were three or four young moorhens in it. The old bird had slipped away as he came near, and diving under the surface rose ten yards off under a projecting bush.
Bevis dropped on his knee to take one of the young birds, but in an instant they rolled out of the nest, with their necks thrust out in front, and fell splash in the water, where they swam across, one with a piece of shell clinging to its back, and another piece of shell was washed from it by the water. Pan was by his side in a minute; he had heard the splash, and seen the young moorhens, and with a whine, as Mark kicked him—unable to hold him any longer—he rushed across.
“They are such pretty dear little things,” said Bevis, in an ecstasy of sentiment, calling to Mark. “Lie down!” banging Pan with a dead branch which he hastily snatched up. The spaniel’s back sounded hollow as the wood rebounded, and broke on his ribs. “Such dear little things! I would not have them hurt for anything.”
Bang again on Pan’s back, who gave up the attempt, knowing from sore experience that Bevis was not to be trifled with. But by the time Mark had got there the little moorhens had hidden in the grasses beside the stream, though one swam out for a minute, and then concealed itself again.
“Don’t you love them?” said Bevis. “I do. I’ll smash you,”—to Pan, cowering at his feet.
The moorhens did not appear again, so they went back and sat on the top of the steep bank, their legs dangling over the edge above the bubbling water.
A broad cool shadow from the trees had fallen over the hatch, for the afternoon had gone on, and the sun was declining behind them over the western hills. A broad cool shadow, whose edges were far away, so that they were in the midst of it. The thrushes sang in the ashes, for they knew that the quiet evening, with the dew they love, was near. A bullfinch came to the hawthorn hedge just above the hatch, looked in and out once or twice, and then stepped inside the spray near his nest. A yellow-hammer called from the top of a tree, and another answered him across the field. Afar in the mowing-grass the crake lifted his voice, for he talks more as the sun sinks.
The swirling water went round and round under the fall, with lines of white bubbles rising, and quivering masses of yellowish foam ledged on the red rootlets under the bank and against the flags. The swirling water, ceaselessly beaten by the descending stream coming on it with a long-continued blow, returned to be driven away again. A steady roar of the fall, and a rippling sound above it of bursting bubbles and crossing wavelets of the hastening stream, notched and furrowed over stones, frowning in eager haste. The rushing and the coolness, and the song of the brook and the birds, and the sense of the sun sinking, stilled even Bevis and Mark a little while. They sat and listened, and said nothing; the delicious brook filled their ears with music.
Next minute Bevis seized Pan by the neck and pitched him over into the bubbles. In an instant, before he came to the surface, as his weight carried him beneath, Pan was swept down the stream, and when he came up he could not swim against it, but was drifted away till he made for the flags, which grew on a shallow spot. There he easily got out, shook himself, and waited for them to come over.
“I am hungry,” said Mark. “What ought we to have to eat; what is right on the Mississippi? I don’t believe they have tea. There is Polly shouting for us.”
“No,” said Bevis thoughtfully; “I don’t think they do. How stupid of her to stand there shouting and waving her handkerchief, as if we could not find our way straight across the trackless prairie. I know—we will have some honey! Don’t you know? Of course the hunters find lots of wild honey in the hollow trees. We will have some honey; there’s a big jar full.”
So they got over the hatch, and went home, leaving their tools scattered hither and thither beside the Mississippi. They climbed up the ha-ha wall, putting the toes of their boots where the flat stones of which it was built, without mortar, were farthest apart, and so made steps while they could hold to the wiry grass-tufts on the top.
“Where’s your hat?” said Polly to Bevis.
“I don’t know,” said Bevis. “I suppose it’s in the brook. It doesn’t matter.”