“Poor, poor Polly! Send for the doctor! What a pity, what a pity, ding dong bell, Polly’s in the well!”
The children looked at one another solemnly when they had finished uncovering themselves. Bill was in great danger, there was no doubt of that at all.
“What are we going to do?” said Lucy-Ann, with tears in her eyes. Nobody quite knew. There seemed to be danger wherever they turned.
“Well,” said Jack at last, “we’ve got a boat of our own, that’s one thing — and I think when it’s dark tonight we’d better set out for the other island, the one the men are on, and see if we can’t find where they keep their motor-boat. We know that Bill will be there.”
“And rescue him!” said Dinah, thrilled. “But how shall we get close in to shore without being seen or heard?”
“We’ll go when it’s dark, as I said,” said Jack, “and when we get near to the shore, we’ll stop our engine and get the oars. Then we can row in without being heard.”
“Oh yes. I’d forgotten there were oars in our boat,” said Dinah. “Thank goodness!”
“Can’t we get back to our little cave, on the shore at the other side of the island?” asked Lucy-Ann. “I don’t feel safe here, somehow. And I’d be glad to know our boat was all right.”
“Also, we can’t have anything to eat till we get back there,” said Philip, getting up. “Come on, I’m frozen. We shall get warm climbing up the rocks, on to the height over there, and then over the island to the boat.”
So they went back over the rocks, and found their clothes where they had left them. They stripped off their wet suits and dressed quickly. Philip’s rats, which he had left in his pockets, were extremely pleased to see him again, and ran all over him with little squeals of delight.
Huffin and Puffin accompanied the children as usual. All of them were secretly relieved to find their boat was safe on the shingly beach. They went to her and chose some tins of food.
“Better have something with lots of juice to drink,” said Jack. “There’s no fresh water here as far as I can see, and I’m awfully thirsty. Let’s open a tin of pineapple. There’s always lots of juice in that.”
“Better open two tins if Kiki’s going to have any,” said Dinah. “You know what a pig she is over pineapple.”
They all tried to be jolly and cheerful, but somehow, what with their strange discovery of the guns in the lagoon, and the news that Bill was in real danger, none of them could talk for long. One by one they fell silent, and hardly knew what they were eating.
“I suppose,” said Dinah at last, after a long silence in which the only noise was the sound of Kiki’s beak scraping against the bottom of one of the pineapple tins, “I suppose we had better set out as soon as it’s dark — but I do feel quaky about it!”
“Well, look here,” said Jack, “I’ve been thinking hard — and I’m sure it would be best if Philip and I went alone to get Bill. It’s very risky, and we don’t know a bit what we shall be up against, and I don’t like the idea of you girls coming.”
“Oh, we must come!” cried Lucy-Ann, who couldn’t bear the thought of Jack going off without her. “Supposing something happened to you — we’d be here on this island all alone, and nobody would know about us! Anyway, I’m going with you, Jack. You can’t stop me!”
“All right,” said Jack. “Perhaps it would be better if we stuck together. I say — I suppose that other fellow they spoke about couldn’t be Horace? We couldn’t have made a mistake about him, could we?”
“Well, I did think he was too idiotic for words,” said Dinah. “I mean — he looked it, not only acted it. I believe we did make a mistake. I think perhaps he really was a bird-lover.”
“Gosh! He must have thought we were frightful!” said Jack, horrified. “And we took his boat too — and left him to be taken prisoner by the enemy!”
“And they must have thought he was Bill’s friend, and have been wild with him when he said he didn’t know Bill or anything about him,” said Philip.
Everyone thought solemnly about poor Horace. “I’m jolly glad none of us hit him on the head, after all,” said Jack. “Poor old Horace Tripalong!”
“We’ll have to rescue him too,” said Lucy-Ann. “That’ll make up a bit for taking his boat. But won’t he be furious with us for all we’ve done!”
Huffin appeared at this moment with his familiar gift of half a dozen fish, neatly arranged head and tail alternately in his large beak. He deposited them at Philip’s feet.
“Thanks, old man,” said Philip. “But won’t you eat them yourself? We daren’t make a fire here to cook anything on.”
“Arrrrrr!” said Huffin, and walked over to have a look in the empty tins. Puffin took the opportunity of gobbling up the fish, and Kiki watched her in disgust. Kiki had no use for fish fresh from the sea.
“Pah!” she said, in Horace’s voice, and the children smiled.
“Kiki, you’ll have to be jolly quiet tonight,” said Jack, scratching her head. “No pahing or poohing to warn the enemy we’re near!”
When the sun began to sink the children took the motor-boat a little way out to sea, to make sure that there were no rocks about that they must avoid when setting out at night. Far away on the horizon line they saw the island of the enemy. Somewhere there was Bill — and perhaps Horace too.
“I hope to goodness we see some kind of light to show us where to go inshore,” said Jack. “We can’t shoot all round the island, looking for the right place. We’d be heard. And we couldn’t possibly row round.”
“Well, we saw that light that was signalling to the other boat last night,” said Philip. “Maybe it will be signalling again. Let’s go back now. There doesn’t seem to be any rock to avoid tonight. We’ll set out as soon as it is dark.”
They went back — and no sooner had they got to their little beach than they heard the humming of an aeroplane.
“Surely they’re not going to drop any more packages!” said Jack. “Lie down flat, all of you. We don’t want to be spotted. Get near those rocks.”
They crouched down near a mass of rocks. The aeroplane made an enormous noise as it came nearer and nearer.
Jack gave a cry. “It’s a seaplane! Look, it’s got floats underneath!”
“What an enormous one!” said Dinah. “It’s coming down!”
So it was. It circled the island once and then came lower as it circled it again. It seemed almost to brush the hill that towered at the other end of the island, the hill that overlooked the lagoon.
Then the engines were cut out, and there was a silence.
“She’s landed,” said Jack. “She’s on the lagoon! I bet you anything you like that’s where she is!”
“Oh, do let’s go and see, as soon as dusk comes,” begged Dinah. “Do you think she’s going to get up the hidden guns?”
“However could she do that?” said Jack, rather scornfully.
“Well, she’s pretty big and hefty,” said Philip. “It’s possible she’s got some sort of apparatus on her for dragging up the hidden armaments. If the men think there’s a danger of our Government sending patrols up here to look into the matter, always supposing that Bill has sent a message through to his headquarters then our enemy will certainly try to remove the guns as soon as possible. It rather looks, seeing that this is a seaplane, as if the guns are going to be flown to South America — or somewhere far across the sea.”
As soon as it was dusk the children could not resist the temptation to go across the island and climb up the heights to peep over and see the lagoon. Even in the twilight they might be able to see something interesting.
They were soon on the cliff overlooking the lagoon. They could just make out the great shape of the giant seaplane in the middle of the sea-lake. Then suddenly lights shone out from it, and a noise began — a grating, dragging noise, as if some kind of machinery was being set to do some heavy work.
“I bet they’re dragging up the packages of guns,” whispered Jack. “We can’t very well see — but we can hear enough to know something is at work, something needing winches, I should think.”
Lucy-Ann didn’t know what winches were, but she could quite well imagine some kind of machinery that would send hooked cables overboard to drag up the heavy bundles of guns. Then the seaplane, when loaded up, would fly off again. And another would come, and another! Or maybe the same one would come back again and again.