It was Easter Sunday and Billy and his Aunt were going to church. The day was to bring forth strange things, but it began as any Sunday might, with bright weather that was a little hot, with a pleasant walk up through the fields while the bells were ringing, with entry into the cool, dim little church and a silent wait, for Aunt Mattie was one of the people who are always early. There was a good deal of stiff rustling of the Appledore population’s Sunday best, as in twos and threes the congregation filed in, fishermen and their wives, some more prosperous ones who farmed as well as fished, the hotel proprietor, and Harvey Jarreth in a suit of very new clothes.
Billy knew well that one should not look around, but he nevertheless turned full about to smile a greeting at Sally Shute when she came into the pew behind him. Her stiff skirts stood out almost straight around her and her yellow braids were brushed until they shone. He observed that she had grown a little taller since last year, but that her pink cheeks were as round as ever and her face as earnest. Her father and mother were with her, and young Jacky, very restless and making continual trouble.
The service began with a prayer that Billy sometimes, during idle moments in a long sermon, had examined curiously in the prayer book and wondered if it were ever used. “In Time of War and Tumults,” it was headed, and reminded him of what for a little time he had forgotten, that there was a war. He looked out of the window and tried to think of it as true, but failed. No, there certainly could not be a war, not on such a day as this. Then he saw that one of the fishermen’s wives was crying quietly behind her pew, yes, and there was another over in the corner doing the same thing. They had boys who were bluejackets in the Navy, he supposed, and were foolish enough to think that something might happen to them. On the way up the hill, Aunt Mattie had been giving him a little talk on history and had pointed out that nearly all of our wars began in April. Why in April, he wondered, when everything seemed less like war then than at any other time of the year. He began to think idly of how many Easter Sundays there must have been just like this one, back, back as far as the Revolution, when women bravely put on their best and toiled up to the church, only to cry in secret behind the pews because there was going to be a war. Why—
His mind was wandering farther and farther from the service. Suddenly it was brought back by a quick touch upon his arm.
“Captain Saulsby is in the doorway,” whispered Sally Shute behind him. “I think he wants you for something.”
There indeed stood the old sailor in the door, looking distressed and uncomfortable and peering about as though in search of some one. He seemed much relieved when he caught Billy’s eye and saw the boy rise to tiptoe out. He put a paper into Billy’s hand as they went down the path together.
“I want that telephoned to the telegraph office at Rockport,” he said. “I have tried to do it myself, but I can’t hear quite well enough to make sure they have got it right, and I don’t want the hotel clerk to give it for me, or he would be telling it all over the Island. I hope your Aunt won’t mind it that I called you out of the church.”
Billy read over the message, then, in bewilderment, read it again.
“Why, Captain Saulsby,” he said, “it doesn’t make sense!”
“I know it,” agreed the Captain, “and I don’t quite know what it stands for myself. But that naval officer from Piscataqua who was out here yesterday told me to send such and such a message if this thing or that thing happened; he wrote out several to cover different cases. I suppose he thought I couldn’t get a regular cipher code straight. Maybe I couldn’t.”
The day before, Captain Saulsby had had a visitor whose coming had seemed both to please him and to make him feel important. An officer from one of the warships lying in the harbour of Piscataqua had come all the way to Appledore to see him. At first the old man had announced that he would speak to no officer unless he came to apologize for the Navy’s refusal of its best recruit; but he had finally changed his mind and had held a long and earnest talk with his guest in the garden.
“There’s a use for old men after all, if they just know something,” he said mysteriously to Billy that evening, and had seemed so cheered that he could even speak of potato-planting without bitterness.
Billy went into the hotel’s telephone booth and sent the message, spelling out each word laboriously, since the girl operator at the other end was not used to taking code messages and seemed much annoyed at the lack of meaning.
“I can’t waste my time sending such nonsense,” was her first tart comment, and it required much persuasion to make her believe that all was as it should be.
When he had finished with Captain Saulsby’s message, he proceeded to send another on his own account. It was a cablegram to his father, asking if he would give his consent, should Billy wish to enlist in the Navy.
“If there is going to be a real war I might want to go in by and by,” he reflected. “It will take two months to get a letter answered, so I may as well ask this way. I’m afraid he won’t say yes. If I were eighteen I wouldn’t have to ask him. But once it is done I know he and mother wouldn’t object.”
It took some little time to get this dispatch off, as he had first to go up to his room to look up the address. His father had left his mother in Lima and had gone up to some little mining town in the Andes, where the Spanish names were of the most unpronounceable kind. The operator’s short temper was quite exhausted when at last she had got it all.
“When you think up anything new, let me know,” was her acid farewell as she rang off.
Captain Saulsby had grown tired of waiting and had walked back to his cottage. Billy found him at the foot of the garden, staring out to sea through the binoculars that had been one of the trophies of their adventure at the mill.
“Nice glasses that German fellow left us,” the old sailor remarked as he lowered them to change the focus. Then he added more slowly, “I shouldn’t wonder if he would be coming back for them one of these days.”
“Why, how can you think that?” cried Billy astonished.
“Well,” the Captain returned reflectively, “there’s Harvey Jarreth now. He has been sporting a lot of new clothes lately and has been getting money from somebody. There is no person about here complaining that Harvey has cheated him, so it must be coming from outside. He is bound that he will prove yet that he wasn’t fooled in that affair last summer, and we can’t tell just how far that folly will take him. There are other things, too, big and little, down to foot-tracks in my potato patch. But the last one is that yacht out there; she has gone by the Island three times already today, and I don’t like her looks. She may belong to some harmless, dirt-common millionaire, and then she may not. I know all of that kind of vessel that sails in these waters and she’s a new one to me.”
He adjusted the glass again and looked long at the moving speck and the wreath of smoke that trailed across the sea.
“I don’t like her,” he repeated, shaking his head, “and I’ve sent a message to that officer telling him so.”
Billy had a look at the vessel also, but could make nothing of her. To him she might have been any one of a thousand pleasure boats that plied those seas in summer time.
“Well, there is nothing to do but wait,” the Captain said at last, as the yacht disappeared and he closed the glasses into their case with a snap.
Wait they did through the length of a hot, sultry day. Aunt Mattie’s friendship for the Captain was even great enough to secure her forgiveness for his having called Billy out of church. The boy was sent up to the hotel with a great bunch of spring flowers as a peace offering, but, having delivered them, he went back to the cottage once more to spend the slow hours sitting on Captain Saulsby’s doorstep or walking restlessly up and down the garden.
What he was expecting, or what Captain Saulsby expected, he did not know at all; but whatever the possibilities were, for long hours nothing occurred. The sun disappeared under a cloud, the atmosphere grew hotter and heavier: it was plain that a storm was coming, although as yet there was no wind. Far out to sea the big bell-buoy was rocking in the uneasy swells, and ringing fitfully. The time passed, the afternoon darkened to twilight, the sun emerged a moment, then went down in a blaze of angry, coppery red, but still nothing happened. Perhaps Captain Saulsby had been quite mistaken.
It had grown quite dark and the church bells were ringing again for the evening service, but Billy was still sitting before Captain Saulsby’s door. Quick steps—they could be no other than Sally Shute’s—came across the garden, and the little girl stepped out of the dark and sat down beside him.
“Mother and Jacky have gone to church,” she said, “but I came over here to see the Captain. Is he sick again, or anything? Is something wrong?”
“No,” returned Billy with an effort, “No, nothing’s wrong.”
Even if he had felt free to tell her, he could hardly have explained what was amiss. A heavy feeling in the air, a queer thrill inside him, a vague sensation that something big, too big to understand, was about to happen: could one call that “something wrong”? Billy hardly thought so and therefore kept silent.
Sally moved about uneasily for a little while, got up, seated herself again, then finally jumped up once more.
“I can’t keep still, Billy Wentworth, and no more can you,” she announced. “Let’s go down on the beach.”
They went down over the sparse sea-grass, across the smooth water-worn rocks to the beach, left hard and wet by the receding tide.
For a short time they walked on the sand without speaking. The winter storms had washed up quantities of driftwood that now lay, dry and bleached white, in tumbled heaps here and there above high water mark. The two sat down by one of them at last, when they became weary of tramping up and down. Suddenly Sally lifted her head to listen.
“Why does the bell-buoy ring louder?” she questioned.
It was true that the far-off clanging voice sounded clearer, all at once; it rang loud and steady through the quiet night for a moment, then dropped again to the faint, intermittent “clang-clang-clang,” to which Billy had listened all the afternoon.
“What could ring it like that?” he was asking himself, but even while he was so thinking the answer came to him. The waves of a passing steamer would rock the buoy for just that length of time, setting it to calling louder through the windless silence. They sat waiting and by and by heard a sharp swish, swish, as a succession of heavier swells broke upon the sandy beach. Yes, it must have been a steamer, coming close in, under cover of the dark. What was she? The shore boat?
No, that had been lying at the wharf for an hour. The Boston steamer? That was not yet running. Could she be a certain white yacht of clean-cut, racing lines, the one that had slipped by Appledore in the fog,............