Winter Holiday. Arthur Ransome

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CHAPTER V

      SKATING AND THE ALPHABET

      MR DIXON had been up the fell before breakfast, and brought down the news that the ice on the tarn was bearing properly at last. Mrs Dixon had passed the news on. “Well,” she said, “you’ll be coming to no harm, if you follow Miss Susan.” School trunks had been opened, and skates and boots and knapsacks taken out. Mrs Dixon had made them two packets of sandwiches, given them a couple of oranges apiece, and put a big bottle of milk in Dorothea’s knapsack. “They’ll be bringing milk from Jackson’s, I’ve no doubt, but there’s no call for any to go short.” They rolled up their skates in newspaper and stowed them in the knapsacks for easy carrying.

      It was a fine, crisp day after a night of hard frost. There was a clear sky overhead, and as Dick and Dorothea climbed the cart track they could see above the trees every cleft and gully of the distant mountains. The climb to the old barn seemed only half as long as it had been when they had gone up there for the first time. Dorothea felt more like dancing than walking. Every now and then Dick seemed to be on the very point of breaking into a run on the cropped pale grass at the side of the track, and these sudden jerkinesses in his walking showed Dorothea that he, too, was as eager as herself.

      “I wonder if they’re at the igloo already,” she said.

      “They can’t be,” said Dick. “Not with the red-caps having to row across the lake.”

      But as they came up to the barn and caught the first glimpse of Holly Howe they saw that the business of the day had already begun. There was the end of the old whitewashed farm-house showing between the trees. There was that upper window that had once been Mars. But there was something new.

      “What’s that they’ve got on the wall?” said Dorothea. “Above the window.”

      Dick pulled out his telescope.

      “A big black square,” he said. “Up on end. Like a diamond.”

      “It’s a signal,” said Dorothea.

      “But how are we to know what it means?” said Dick.

      There was a hail in the distance, and they saw John, alone, scrambling through the dead bracken on the ridge beyond the tarn. Anybody could see that he was in a hurry as he came to the ice, stamped on it once or twice and then came quickly across, walking and sliding. He had a knapsack on his back and was carrying a big, awkward white parcel. Dick and Dorothea went to meet him as he came racing up the slope.

      “How does our signal look from the barn?” he panted. “Can you see what it is?”

      He turned and looked back to Holly Howe.

      “Not half bad,” he said.

      “But what does it mean?” asked Dick.

      “We haven’t decided yet,” said John. “Let’s try how it works from this end. I stuck some whitewash on these to make them show against the dark stone. Can I go up?”

      “Of course,” said Dorothea.

      “Let’s,” said Dick.

      They went up the steps and into the loft where Dorothea and Dick had shivered two nights before while sending out their flashes to catch the attention of the Martians. John propped his parcel against the wall, where Dick examined it carefully. It was simply two big flat pieces of wood, one of them a triangle and the other a square.

      “Look out!” said John. “The whitewash is only just drying!”

      “Have you lost something?” said Dorothea, seeing John looking this way and that about the loft.

      “I just want something for a hammer,” said John. He ran down the steps again, and came back with a biggish stone.

      “This’ll do,” he said, trying it in his hand, and went to the big window. He stood there on the sill, holding to the wall with his right hand and reaching round it and as high up it as he could with his left. He found a crack between the stones, pushed into it a big nail that he fished out of his pocket, battered it firmly in with his stone hammer, and gave it a last knock from below to make it turn upwards.

      “But I won’t be able to reach as high as that,” said Dick, who guessed what he was doing.

      “Half a minute,” said John. “You won’t have to.”

      Out of his pocket he brought a ball of string, another large nail, some double hooks of thick fencing wire, and a big brass curtain ring.

      Dick and Dorothea watched, open-mouthed.

      John threaded the string through the curtain ring, reached round the wall to hang it on the nail he had just fixed, pulled the string through until it was long enough to reach the ground outside, dropped the ball after it, picked up the other nail, the hooks and the wooden shapes, and hurried out and down the steps. The other two ran down after him.

      He cut off the ball of string and put it in his pocket. Then he fastened one of his hooks to the string, tying the two ends of the string together so that neither end should slip through the ring high up on the end of the barn.

      “If it ever comes down,” he said, “don’t either of you try reaching out of that window to put it right again. Wait for Nancy or me.”

      He hung the triangle on the hook by a hole in one of its corners. Then, hand over hand, he hoisted it up until it reached the nail on the wall, where it hung staring white against the dark weather-beaten stones.

      “It’ll hang either way,” he said, “pointing up or down. There’s a hole in one of its sides on purpose. And you can make the other one hang either like a square or like a diamond. And the double hooks are so that you can hang one above another. Well, we’ll soon know if it works. Watch Holly Howe.”

      “There’s someone at the window,” said Dick, whose telescope was already pointing at Mars. “Red-caps.”

      “Nancy and Peggy.”

      “The black square’s going!” cried Dorothea.

      “They’re hauling it down,” said John. “They’ve seen all right. Yes. I thought so. There comes the triangle!”

      A black triangle was climbing slowly up the white wall above the upper window at the end of the farm.

      “Now we’ll try the other way.” He hauled his own white triangle down, unhooked it, and hooked it on again by a hole in the middle of one of its sides, so that it hung point downwards.

      “South cone,” he said. “When they hoist that in harbour it means a storm from the south.”

      “May I pull it up?” said Dick.

      “Go ahead!” said John. “Your signal station.”

      “Observatory,” said Dick, but he hoisted away all the same, and the triangle had no sooner reached the nail than СКАЧАТЬ