The Isle of Seven Moons/Chapter 25
CHAPTER XXV
OVER THE TRAIL
"the bleaching bones."
"Human skeletons?"
"Yes—they've been there for years—unburied."
"Show me the trail!"
"You won't thank me if I do, Sally."
"I'm game, Ben."
"I tell you it's spooky."
"Not in the bright sunlight."
"It's pretty shivery even then. This island is beautiful enough, but there is something strange about it. It's the most real unreal place I've ever seen, and I've been in some queer places. It stands out clear before us now, shore and green trees like a stairway, and that blue mountain over there—yet somehow you expect it every minute to melt away in a mist."
"Spanish Dick says it's covered with a mist like a veil with gold stars in it—and it's a floating island—nothing under it—no foundation of any kind—just clear water"
"It does have that feel," the boy went on. "At night, once or twice, I've lain here on the fern and I've felt the motion like a ship's deck on a calm sea—but always moving quietly on. I've looked up through the palms, and the stars did not keep their relative positions to us, and the branches moved slowly across them, as if we were sailing, headed west. I was wide awake, and after I did fall asleep and later woke up in the morning, it has always seemed as if we had drifted in the night, on and on over the horizon into some sea that was never charted."
He laughed queerly, then added:
"Of course I laid it to nerves and the loneliness."
"Of course, dear, but did you see the seven moons?"
"The moons?" he repeated.
"Yes, Spanish Dick says there are seven."
"He's crazy—but"
He never finished the sentence, and Sally thinking he had had enough of spookiness, jumped up. "Let's see that trail," she said.
So hand and hand, as all true lovers at one and twenty should, they passed along the curve of the shining sands to Coral Cove. Behind them rose the terraces of the green isle, in varying shades of that lovely colour, ascending to the cone of mountain, tinted richly blue, like a swallow's wings, and sharply picked out against a turquoise sky as innocent of white clouds as the surrounding sea of human sail—all crystal clear and yet unreal, as the boy had said.
They reached Coral Cove and there, where the white cliffs cast cooling shadows, came on the object of their search.
At their feet, half buried in the sands, white and pink-flushed from the myriad coral particles sifting through them, lay the bleaching bones; the perfect bars of the ribs, and the great rusting hoops of iron casks, showing that the stillness of the island had once been broken by human revellers.
Yes, even in the clear sunshine it was mysterious and shivery.
Spanish Dick crossed himself hurriedly, calling on the name of another new saint—Sally did not hear—she had long ago lost count.
"Now mebbe, Señorita, you believe my tale of the islan'."
"Of course, Dick," said Sally soothingly over her shoulder, but she whispered to Ben:
"Don't think I'm silly enough to really believe all his stories, but they're always pretty and interesting, and that's the main thing. I'd rather have Spanish Dick with me any day than Aunt Abigail, who's always so keen for the truth, and kills all the joy in life. And, as Cap'n Harve says, we're young only once. Say, Ben, does it ever seem as though we'd be old some day?"
The boy looked at her. It did seem impossible that Age could ever stiffen that lissom figure in blue, and slacken the blood dancing through her veins. Could he really wrinkle that lovely-curved forehead, blanch the red and tan of those rounded cheeks? Could he have the heart to destroy so fair a thing?
There was a little look of impatience about her averted face, as she waited for an answer which, womanlike, she wanted and would have. The boy had no knack of pretty speeches like old Mr. Schauffler, and he had not yet found conversation easy, even with Sally, after that year on the island.
"Why don't you say something? A gentleman should always have some answer for a question like that."
But all Ben could say was:
"You'll always look good to me, Sally."
It was quite enough and she gave him one of her impulsive little hugs.
Little cared they about any old thing like Age, even though her black slipper was even then stirring the indisputable evidence of his ghastly chemistry, there in the sands.
She looked down at the blanching skeletons.
"It is spooky—but let's just think it's a picture puzzle to piece together."
Again she surveyed the skeletons, then the hoops half gnawed away by rust.
"This part, anyway, is easy."
"Yes," Ben answered, "I could figure out that much."
"It's like a story book—isn't it?" she went on, counting the glistening breast bones with their rows of ribs, "there were eleven of them, real pirates and"—here her voice deepened to a rich contralto as she unconsciously assumed the phraseology of the old tales—"they must have counted their red gold and then drank deep of Jamaica rum.
"And then they fell out and quarrelled over the gold, and some of them fell on the others—and when it was over—there were left here—those eleven.
"Yes, Sally, that's just the way I figured it."
"But how long ago it must have been!"
"No one can tell that but it was a long time ago."
"I wonder how many escaped."
"That's the next part of the puzzle—let's move on."
She was glad to do that, and they left Coral Cove, Spanish Dick giving a wide curve to the ghastly relics, quite as little yellow Alfonso who trotted behind him would have shunned a feline stranger. They clambered up the limestone cliffs and found the old trail, leading back through a clump of feathery bamboos and thickets of tall grasses, to another grove of royal palms on the first green terrace of the ascent.
"Have a drink, Sally."
She bent over and looked down through the pellucid depths of the spring, her lips starting the silver circles in its surface. She lifted her head and looked at the laughing face trembling in the mirror. At the bottom, far below the wavering features, little bubbles welled like tiny ascending spirits.
"How pretty!" she exclaimed—and then started back with a shudder as she made out—other things besides those silver bubbles in the gravel at the bottom,—a human breast bone with its ribs still intact, and worn even whiter by the action of the waters than its fellows on the sands a mile away.
"You did jump, Sally," said Ben, "but never mind, I did, too, when I first saw it."
She looked down into the clear depths again, then drew back and almost shrieked:
"Look at that!"
"What?"
"That"— A white finger pointed downward.
Straight through the breast-bone, and standing still up right after who knows how many generations, stood the haft and blade of a corroded dagger, brown-red with what must have been only rust, though it seemed to the girl like stains of blood.
After a moment she recovered herself sufficiently to go on with her theory, though in a much lower key.
"Those that were left followed the trail here and they quarrelled on the way. Then the leader of the mutineers killed the one who lies down there, with that knife, as he stopped to drink."
A round white pebble, disturbed by her foot, rolled over the brink, stirring the placid surface. Another face, dark and mysterious and framed with great round earrings, was indistinctly reflected beside her own in the trembling waters.
She started back, violently this time, as if to escape a knife-thrust aimed at her own slender shoulder-blades. But it was only Spanish Dick. He withdrew quite as quickly as she, having no ingenious explanation for this new mystery.
There was a crash in the underbrush a few yards away, and all three stood transfixed as if expecting an attack from the spirits who haunted the island. And even Ben himself was more startled than he cared to confess.
Spanish Dick was unconsciously making, with clenched thumb, second, and third fingers, and uplifted first and fourth, the old sign of the horn with which the superstitious exorcise the evil one.
But it was only a wild boar who emerged from the thicket and trotted with lowered tusks and slavering jaws across the open.
There were three sighs of relief, of varying intensity, but nevertheless, it was with silent trepidation that they hit the trail again.
On the next terrace, the lustrous green of mangoes and limes, mingling with the wilder tropical trees and shrubs, gave the first evidence which they had seen of human habitation, long years ago. But to the three explorers these traces of their own kind did not clear, but seemed to deepen the mystery, just as had the decaying foundations of the squatters huts, and the keel and ribs of a long-boat imbedded in the sand, which they had noticed from the cliff, a little farther back.
Men had dwelt here once—and had gone. The natives had vanished, too. Had never-ending misfortunes visited civilized white and naked black, as it had the wild buccaneers of the Spanish Main, until the very place seemed cursed by the "Voodoos" whom all born in the Caribbees fear! Could it be haunted? Here, at any rate, it was hauntingly lovely. It was a place for bright angels, not demons of the dark.
Giant tree-ferns brushed their faces. Little checkered serpents spiralled through the undergrowth. Above them jabbered busy macaws in their gay coats of vermilion and indigo and emerald. Lichens misted the great boles of the mahoganies with silver-white like summer hoar frost, and the flaming scarlet of poncianas framed the black tresses of her hair. And when, forgetting for a moment the ghastly relics of the island, she laughed aloud, Ben saw that the pearly-white sheen of orchids for which a merchant-prince would have given a fortune, exactly matched her teeth.
Then, as the crowning touch to this gay carnival of Nature, the quintessence of all the riot of colour, they saw what seemed to be a little heart of many hued fires, palpitating above the blossoms—a humming bird of rare species and rarer loveliness.
It was all a beautiful fantasy, the girl thought, more be witching even than the one she had seen that Christmas when Captain Harve had taken her to the theatre in Boston.
"Oh—it is so lovely!" she exclaimed, clasping her hands in ecstasy. "It almost seems as if Peter Pan must appear any minute out of that wood there."
They journeyed on and entered a forest with limbs and trunks tangled in an intricate maze of liana vines, like a great ship's ropes—then a space where the trees had thinned a little, and the pattern overhead was broken with little rents of blue, the lighter—bits of the sky above, the dark—bits of the sea below.
Then at last they reached the cool silences of Cathedral Woods, and under the great arches ate their lunch of dried beef, and crackers, and cheese, while birds, coloured like those little patches, flashed from branch to branch.
"Azur de la Vergin," exclaimed the gypsy-sailor.
"And what does that mean?" questioned Sally.
"The blue of the Virgin. They are Her carrier pigeons. If you hear and have the faith, some day they bring a message to you, when you are in trouble. They are blue like thoughts of love, not like that one up there, he is one big bad thought. He picks the bones of the dead."
Their eyes followed his pointing finger, long, brown as tobacco, and marked with the two warts he was forever trying to wheedle away with outlandish charms and brews. A buzzard soared above them in concentric circles, quite, as the gypsy had said, like a thought of evil hovering over this enchanted paradise. It was far away, and yet, somehow, it oddly reminded Sally of the story of the little cloud no bigger than a man's hand, and how it grew and grew, told her when she wore pigtails and used to sit in the high-backed pews of the old church. How far away that sanctuary seemed!
But their eyes returned to the little heavenly messengers, flitting so peacefully above them, and Ben, his tongue unloosed at last, told her of his nicknames for these and all the other wonderful things on the island. She did not smile at them at all, for, with a little tremor of sympathy, she realized what a pathetic game it had been, that and all the tasks he had devised, battling against despair in this lonely place whose very loveliness at times seemed almost sinister.
She was almost for giving up the hunt then and there, but they tossed aside their feelings of depression, and ate, and laughed, and sang, till they woke the echoes of wood and cliff and were happy again. When Don Alfonso had devoured the last scrap, they rose and walked to the brink of the great gorge which severed Cathedral Woods from the last slope of the mountain.
"Hear that, Sally!"
A voice like thunder, shot through with notes of laughter, rose from four hundred feet below where the white waterfall ended, and yet never ended, the leap it started with such wild abandon by their side.
"What name did you give that, dear?"
Ben flushed a little under his coppery tan.
"Tell me," she repeated with sweet insistence.
"Don't think I'm crazy—I was a little ahead of time—but I called it Sally's Bridal Veil!"
"Crazy? I think you're a dear."
She had to kiss him for that, of course—and then, as Spanish Dick was trying to tame another parrot more brilliant than his own pet, and the little yellow Don Alfonso was always a model of discretion—why, she kissed him again.
Then—after a moment—maybe it was ten—he shouted to make himself heard above the roar of the cascade.
"We'll have to stop here—I'll tell you about the rest."
"Oh—don't stop now—just when we've reached the most interesting part. We've just got to finish that picture puzzle, you know."
"Do you see that bridge?"
"Yes."
"Well, it's too dangerous for a girl."
She gauged it with a glance. Perilous indeed seemed the swaying passage over the few rotted planks, haphazardly laid on tenuous cables of liana vines. It was very old and guarded only by an uncertain hand rail, of the same vines, from the rocky chasm where the water-fall thundered. The girl took a deep breath.
"I can make it."
"But there's worse beyond."
But the black ties with their slender toes and heels of a military cut, not stilted like Carlotta's, but attractively feminine, Ben thought, were already on the first plank.
Ben followed, right behind, ready to grasp her if she faltered, then Spanish Dick with considerable ease, for his hardened bare feet had an almost prehensile faculty now, and finally, Don Alfonso, bewildered but with implicit faith in the guidance of his light-hearted master. The crossing achieved, he crouched at Dick's feet, his salmon-hued tongue lolling over his jaws. It was funny—that little yellow dog seemed the most human thing, the clearest connecting link with their old world, in all that strange setting.
They walked along the ledge of the gorge toward the sea, not always daring to look down, for the sheer cliffs were dizzying, but now and then glancing at the trickling stream, as it raced with bright-flashing courage to meet the leagues of rollers, storming the breast of the sea wall just beyond.
They reached the wall, facing the west, high above the tossing white plumes. Northward, they could see the masts and spars of the North Star and, near by, the strange yacht, both, at that distance, looking like miniature models rather than craft that sailed the ocean.
"We'll call this a day's work, Sally," said Ben. "You can't go any further. The cave is at the end of the path—just in the second curve of the S. But there's no use trying to look at it. That's just what that big buzzard up there wants you to do. I'll tell you all about it just as well."
"Not when I've come as far as this," she said. "I'm not one of your fussed up city girls, and I can climb. Why, I've been on the maintop of the North Star—several times—when it was pretty rough."
The girl was determined, so they wound around the jutting rock to the path in the cliff, while Spanish Dick sat him down tailor-fashion, in a nook just out of the wind. From his faded shirt he drew a much-stained pack of cards, and proceeded to tell Alfonso s fortune in some Spanish lingo, shaking his curly-head and earrings the while.
"Ah, my little Alfonso, thou hast no head to see things that are not in front of thy nose, but thou hast a loyal heart and, as the Americano says, it is white, though thy hide be yellow.' The cards tell good things for thee—very good things. Thou wilt be very happy with great bones, and a place in paradise, where little dogs with souls like thine can bark at the stars, and moon, and wear no collars or chains—that is after a little time—a very little time—in Purgatory.
"Now a little fortune for us." The cards slapped on the rock. "No—I do not like that! That ace of diamonds comes again and again, between the dark lady and knaves with the winking eyes—no I do not like that."
Hugging the sea wall to steady themselves against unbalancing puffs of wind, the young folks crept around the jagged, coiling path to the mouth of the cavern.
Gaining the opening, they started to enter the airy first chamber, when Ben, remembering, placed his hand on her elbow, guiding her past a little heap of objects that lay scattered on the floor.
Sally, peering in towards the dark recesses, did not notice them until Ben spoke.
"Another nice little piece of your picture puzzle."
Long ago the winds of the ocean had whirled away the mounds of dust, after the ancestors of that buzzard above them had finished their work, but the bones, disturbed a little by the boy's mad flight a year ago, remained, the index-finger still pointing in towards the shadows.
The girl trembled to him. But her courage, and the fascination of those shadows, were greater than her fright. Hand in hand, they passed on into the darkness.
Taking out the little blue box of matches which, like the yellow dog back on the gorge, seemed an odd connecting link between them and the world they had known, the boy lighted the pine-knot he had brought with him. Aided by this unsteady torch, they curved around the elbow of the tunnel, stooping where the roof was low, and straightening as they came into the inner chamber, hallowed by Nature out of the great rock.
"Ooh! what are those?" shrieked Sally.
Far within, two pairs of yellow ovals gleamed like great cat's eyes in the dead of night. They dimly descried the outline of black shapes. Her cry startled them. Something brushed her hair. She fell back panting, against the sides of the cavern which echoed to great, hoarse cries as the black shapes sailed past them.
"Only birds," whispered Ben, "don't be frightened."
But he shook a little, himself.
Upon the walls the flickering torch cast capering shadows—of themselves and a thousand other impish figures which they could not see.
Then, turned on the floor, the light revealed the last of the ghastly relics—another skeleton, quite undisturbed, its long arm and the bones of its fingers clutched as if about to grasp something just beyond its reach, when the evil heart stopped beating.
The boy turned the torch once more and she saw the stone.
"What do you see?"
"Only a stone." Then she added "Why, there are queer markings upon it."
"What do you make of that?"
"Circles and odd lines—yes and numbers and letters—it looks like a chart."
"Could that be a map of the island?"
"It can't be anything else."
"And there's treasure on it! Those pirates didn't divide their gold, after all—back there on the beach. They were looking for the key to treasure that was buried by some one else, before they landed."
Then she continued in an awed voice:
"The last two reached the cavern, and even they had to fall out. One died at the mouth of the cavern, the other crawled here to die."
As she turned and looked behind her another little cry was echoed back.
"Ooh—it moved!"
"What moved?" asked the boy a little roughly.
"That hand!"
She shrank back into the shelter of his arms. She had distinctly seen the hand move—and towards the stone.
"It was only your foot. You knocked it when you turned."
Safe in his arms, she sighed with relief, but he could still feel her heart beating against his own.
"I guess we'd better go, now," she said.
Still hand in hand, they hurried out of the cavern, almost pitching over the great sea wall as they hurriedly stepped over the piles of bones at the entrance.
When they reached the spot where the path turned inland along the gorge, she stopped.
"Last Halloween at the Schaufflers', we told ghost-stories, but they were nothing like this. You should have heard Stella scream. If she'd gone in back there, you would have had to carry her out."
Spanish Dick was still in the shelter of the rock, the great earrings, and curly hair under the red bandana, falling over his face as he frowned over the refractory cards.
"I don' like that, Señorita. Again and again I deal them, an' this ace of diamonds—it is the islan' here—she turn up always between the dark lady an' the grinning knaves. You tell your uncle with the many whiskers, by San Mariano with the crooked back, to haul up that anchor damn queeck."