CHAPTER VIII

SIR HENRY MORGAN’S MAP

Christmas came and went without the _Myra_. We had our orange tree decked out in its hundreds of little golden balls, that were real fruit instead of the colored glass ornaments we’d been used to at home. It was awfully pretty. And we gathered armfuls of red and yellow flowers from the garden and the vines on the house wall, and wove garlands to hang on the tree between the oranges, and over the doorways.

After Reddy had gone to bed on Christmas Eve, we filled the stockings, one for each of us, and one for Martin, as Reddy had begged us to do. We hadn’t been able to make any real presents, but we had managed to collect lots of little things that served as pretty good substitutes.

Aunt Mollie had made a big fruit cake, and several pounds of simple sugar candies, and of course there were oranges in plenty, so that much at least was like the usual Christmas “trimmings.”

Then she had cleverly ripped up one of Rosemary’s pretty gowns--a thin pink silk, with velvet roses appliquéd on it, and had made two simply _ducky_ scarfs for Andy and me. And from her famous Mother Robinson Bag (which was still dealing out surprises) she had produced some spools of heavy dark blue silk which she had turned into knitted ties for Dan and Sidney.

We young folks had a little trouble planning our gifts, but in the end we achieved a window box for Aunt Mollie’s room--Dan and Syd made the box out of an old crate, and painted it with some white enamel paint left over from the supply the ship’s carpenter had brought ashore from the _Myra_ to freshen up the bedroom woodwork at Planter’s House.

Syd and I filled it with our choicest blooms from the garden, and Andy gave up her newest, broadest scarlet hair ribbon to dress the whole up in a Christmas bow.

The boys whittled two sturdy walking sticks for Uncle Joe and their father, and Andy and I boiled an awful-looking (and smelling) mess of bark most of one long hot day to get the right shade brown to stain them when they were finished.

Things like that, you know. But we got the real Christmas thrill out of making them, as well as from opening the bundles we received when the day itself finally arrived.

Yet in other ways we couldn’t make it seem to ourselves like Christmas. And when, after dinner, we went out on the terrace and sat there, with the scent of a hundred tropical flowers all about us, watching a gorgeous sunset, (no wonder the first discoverer named it Sunset Island! We had a new and super-variety every evening) it was just perfectly _fantastic_ to connect the day with our cold, white Christmases at home.

Somebody suggested getting Rosemary’s diary, and taking turns reading it aloud. We hailed this as a brilliant suggestion, and Andy ran for the little book, which she had kept jealously in her own possession ever since the day she discovered it.

She had hardly been gone three minutes when we heard her feet flying across the hall behind us, and she burst out the front door like a small, excited rocket, and tore over the terrace toward us, her heels clicking on the tiles at every leap she took. She was waving the diary above her head in one hand, and something white in the other.

Instinctively everyone sat up, holding his or her breath. It couldn’t be bad news, we knew, because you never saw such a shining face as Andy wore at that moment.

She literally fell over Uncle Charles’ feet, and sat down on the terrace, panting, without strength apparently to get up and find the chair she’d been sitting in before.

“What’s happened?” we chorused.

She waved the white thing weakly again, and we saw now that it was a folded piece of heavy paper, rather dirty and worn along the edges. And suddenly I was as sure of what it was she was flourishing as if she had already told me.

“You’ve found the map,” I faltered. “Oh, _Andy_! _Is_ it?”

She tried to answer, laughed, choked, and tried again.

“The map! Morgan’s map--or--or the copy of Morgan’s map. Look here!” She opened the paper with a dramatic flourish, and it was a map. A rather crude, unremarkable map, except for the romance it stood for and the sprawled names on it: “Morgan’s Beach,” “Gold Hill” and “Dead Men’s Inlet”--which last was kind of gruesomely suggestive to say the least. The points of the compass were given, and in one corner a jumble of figures--latitude and longitude--rather smudgy, and erased, and made pretty well undecipherable by a big blot of ink.

On the map, at the north end, just where it would correspond with our cave, there was a row of three crosses and under them two letters that looked like H--M.

“Henry Morgan,” Syd whispered quickly. “Look closer, there are some words and figures, half blotted out. Those’ll be directions if we can only read ’em. Looks like ‘200 paces from beach, north end lagoon’--_Yep-py_, that’s it--‘20 right’--we did go to the right to the cave. Yess-sir! And look here, too. ‘Cave entrance up 30.’ That’s where we climbed the cliff. It was the cave. It _must_ have been. Let’s have another search tomorrow!”

“Hold on a moment, Syd,” Uncle Joe put in, smiling. “Give me a look at that longitude and latitude, first, before we jump to conclusions.”

“But the places are all here,” Andy urged anxiously. “Our cave, and the lagoon, and the hill. It must be, Uncle Joe.” She was as excited as Syd and I were.

“Quite true, Andy; but what about ‘Dead Men’s Inlet?’ We’ve been entirely around the Island, and we didn’t find an inlet, or even any signs that one might originally have been there.”

We stared at him in silence. It was true. There was no inlet on Sunset Island.

Andy handed the map to him, and we continued to stare while he puzzled out the blurred figures in the corner.

“If this figure’s a one, then the map _is_ of Sunset Island, but it’s possible it’s seven--after looking at it through my glasses, it seems more like a seven after all,” he pronounced slowly. “That throws the calculations away--_way_ out, youngsters, much as I hate to admit it. Maybe, too, some of the other figures aren’t right. And that matter of the inlet is certainly disturbing.”

“And the worst of it is there’s no possible means of telling, is there, unless we had the original map,” I mourned. “Still, we can take shovels up there tomorrow and dig all the floor of those two caves up,” I added, brightening. “It’s soft sand mostly, till we get down to rock, and even the pirates couldn’t have gone through _that_. Uncle Joe, please say it’s worth trying! It’ll be good exercise for our gardening, too.”

It wasn’t until then that we remembered to ask Andy where she’d found the map. It had been sewed inside the silk cover of the diary, the back cover, all the time, and in Andy’s hurry to take the book out of her bureau drawer, a torn edge of the silk had caught on the drawer key and ripped, and a corner of the map had poked through. It was all as simple as that. Blind luck! Well, maybe we’d find the doubloons by help of the same sort of lucky chance, I thought--for I, at any rate, hadn’t given up hope of their being on Sunset Island, inlet or no inlet.

That was the final excitement of our first Christmas Day on the Island. We went to bed fairly early, in order to be able to start by sunrise the next morning for our second treasure hunt in the caves.

But though we dug, and probed and dug again, and carted basketsful of loose sand and earth from one end of the caves to the other, we found no traces--not the littlest silver three-penny piece, or the biggest golden doubloon--not even a rusty knife or a broken axe head--to hint that Sir Henry Morgan’s men had so much as heard of those caves, not to speak of considerately burying their treasure there for us to find.

We even, as a last desperate measure, dug in the cliff outside the cave entrance, and when that failed, explored the whole side and top of the cliff for signs of another suite of caves, without finding them.

On New Year’s Eve, exhausted, hot, dusty and disillusioned, we gave up the expedition, and trooped back to Planter’s House and warm baths.

“So it wasn’t Sunset Island--drat that ignorant buccaneer!” Uncle Joe grumbled quaintly, trying to make us laugh.

We were too weary to achieve more than a feeble chuckle, but we loved his spirit, and rallied to meet our own disappointment in the matter as gamely.

I whispered to Syd as we went up the wide staircase of Planter’s House together, “Let’s put as much energy and hard work on the gold we know is on Sunset Island, and we’ll make honester fortunes than with that bloody old pirate’s stolen treasure.”

“You mean the oranges?” Syd asked, squeezing my arm sympathetically. “All right, Sis; we will.”

And we did. Another month went by--a little more slowly than the preceding two, because by now everyone in the party was keeping an anxious eye out for the _Myra_, and those who were not in the secret did a good deal of speculating as to what could be detaining her.

But the work we had laid out for ourselves progressed encouragingly. The gardens were a delight both to our eyes and our tummies, for the flowers grew as I’ve never seen flowers grow before, and our vegetables were so varied and delicious that we never once missed fresh meat.

We had brought some chickens to the Island with us, and before the _Myra_ sailed, the carpenter had built us a nice little wire-enclosed run for them. So we had eggs for breakfast, and for cooking, pretty steadily. You see, in the usual desert-island story I’d read people were always cast ashore without tools or food or clothes. But though we were almost as hopelessly marooned on our Island, as Robinson Crusoe on his, at least we had come prepared to stay two months, and had outfitted ourselves accordingly.

We had about a quarter of the orange grove cleared, too, and had pruned dead branches, and done what we could to make it all what Uncle Joe calls “shipshape.” The oranges were as sweet as honey to eat. I’d never tasted an orange ripened on the tree, before coming to the Island, and there’s simply no comparison between them, and the kind sold up north.

Uncle Joe was almost as enthusiastic now as Syd and I, over the prospect of building up a big, paying plantation again on Sunset Island. But, of course, to do this, we had to establish communication with the outside world, somehow.

We needed men to work in the grove, and in the bigger produce gardens we were planning. And even more, we needed fertilizer, and new tools, and--of course--a market to ship the results of our labors to, when they were ready.

At the beginning of our fourth month on Sunset Island, Uncle Joe faced the necessity of telling the rest of the family his fears--which were pretty much a certainty now--concerning the _Myra’s_ fate.

He told the facts simply, not exaggerating, but not making light of the matter, either. He went on to say that Syd and I had known all the time, and had pluckily kept still about it in order not to worry the others in the party until it was sure the schooner was not coming.

No one made an outcry, or even spoke, for a long minute. Aunt Mollie grew very pale, and set her lips firmly together, and Uncle Charles reached out and took her hand in both of his. But it was Andy who astonished us utterly. She looked straight at Uncle Joe and smiled.

“I knew, too,” she said quietly. “Not as long as Gay and Syd did, but quite a while. I overheard them talking about it on the beach the first night we spent in the caves.”

So that was it, after all. And she’d kept it to herself even when I caught her crying in the dark that night. I felt awfully mean and remorseful, to remember the things I’d thought about Andy’s selfishness and lack of consideration, I can tell you, and judging by Syd’s amazed expression, he was feeling the same way.

He said to me, later that day, referring to Andy, “It’s the Island, Sis. I can’t describe it, but somehow it’s--it’s been doing things to all of us. Changing us--well, making us--a little _bigger_, I guess, since we’ve lived on it. Do you get what I mean? Andy couldn’t have kept a secret that scared her half to death, at home in Braeburn.”

“I don’t believe we could have, either,” I reminded him. “Yes, I reckon it is the Island.”

When I get excited, I usually say “reckon” as Aunt Mollie does sometimes. Aunt Mollie and my own mother were from Georgia and even after living all her married life in New England, some of Aunt Mollie’s pretty Southern expressions still slip out at times. None of her own children have caught them from her, which seems odd, but I’ve always been as imitative as a monkey.

However, to go back to Syd, and the subject of the Island, after the above digression (as I’ve seen real authors say sometimes in books).

It was perfectly true, all that Syd had said, and he was pretty smart, for a boy, to have reasoned it out like that. The Island had done something to every one of us.

Look at the change in Uncle Charles! Not only in health, I mean, but in giving him back his courage and steady nerves. And Aunt Mollie had regained all the pounds she’d lost while Uncle Charles was ill, and she seemed most of the time as young, and untroubled as Andy or I.

Then, there was the way we’d all learned to work--constructively is the word Uncle Charles would use, I think. And working outdoors the way we had, had made us awfully fit physically, and sort of mentally alert, too, if you can understand what I mean.

You had to keep right on your mental tip-toes, every minute on Sunset Island, if you were going to get along.

The others must have been thinking very much the same thing, for one evening after supper, Aunt Mollie brought up the subject.

“Joe,” she began, wrinkling her forehead up as she does when she’s thinking specially hard. “If the _Myra_ should come back in the near future--and she may, you know, there might be all sorts of reasons for this delay--or if she doesn’t, but we succeed in hailing another vessel that’ll be sure to pass some day, why, I--” She stopped, and thought again, harder.

“I know,” Uncle Charles put in eagerly, “what you’re trying to say, Mollie. Or I believe I do. You don’t want, even if the chance comes, to go back to Braeburn. Well, what’s more, I don’t want to, either. I’ve found health and peace of mind here; plenty of work for my hands, and not too much for my brain--it was the other way about in Braeburn. I hope Joe will decide, if--and when--a ship touches here, to let the Jennings family stay on in Planter’s House, and oversee his plantation. What do the other members of my family say to such a plan?”

We chorused it quickly, and very decidedly.

“We want to stay. _We--want--to--stay!_”

“We’ll talk of this again, Charles,” Uncle Joe said, but I noticed his face smoothed out as if someone had removed a big weight from his shoulders. He knew now we weren’t in our hearts blaming him for stranding us on his Island.

I might almost end the story of this part of Gay Annersley’s life on Sunset Island right here, with that conversation out on the tiled terrace. Because, after all, things worked out exactly as we’d said then that we wanted them to do. It was almost like the old fairy tales of the three wishes coming true.

We’d wished the _Myra_ would come back safely; we’d wished we needn’t go away in her, but could stay on, on Sunset Island; and we’d wished to make our plantation a success, so we could remain at Planter’s House and all of us have enough money to live on, and perhaps leave the Island every few years for a trip somewhere--just so we wouldn’t entirely lose sight of our old world.

Now see how they were answered--those three wishes that the whole family wished in concert that evening.

I was usually the first person up and out in the mornings, and on the morning after that talk of ours, I was sort of restless, and woke particularly early.

Scrambling into my clothes, I caught up a bath towel, and stole downstairs and out of the house, meaning to go down the Planter’s Road--now beautifully cleared and leveled--to the beach for a morning dip in the lagoon.

I reached the beach, according to plan, but I never got that swim--at least not that day. For there, about a mile beyond the barrier reef, heading straight for me, cutting the clear blue water with a sharp black bow, and showing all her white gulls’ wings against the blue sky, came the _Myra_ herself. I knew her at my first glimpse of her. I guess I’m not a sailor’s daughter for nothing, after all, for I’ve got a real seaman’s memory for the identity of ships even from a distance.

I don’t know how I got back to the house. I remember I was crying so I couldn’t see where I put my feet, and once fell down, _hard_, sprawling out flat on my hands and face.

I began calling the news when I was way across the tiled terrace, at the top of my voice, and by the time I reached the front door the family were already tumbling down the stairs in bathrobes and slippers, and for a minute ’most everybody was crying on each other’s shoulders, and it was bedlam, nothing less.

Then we calmed down, went back to our rooms, put some clothes on and hurried to the beach.

By the time we reached there the _Myra_ was just coming through the opening in the reef, and a few moments later she was riding at anchor in the identical spot she’d anchored in four months ago, and a boat was pulling ashore from her.

The first person we recognized in it was Martin, and how we shouted and clapped when we saw him. Poor Reddy burst into tears and tried to explain to him, all that distance across the lagoon, that he’d saved Martin’s Christmas stocking for him.

We had the entire crew of the _Myra_ ashore for breakfast in Planter’s House--they were all old hands who had sailed for years with Uncle Joe and seemed to him sort of like one big family.

Aunt Mollie and Andy and I cooked the most enormous breakfast for them, and the two uncles and Syd and Dan waited on them, while Reddy, who was much too excited to be trusted with anything breakable to carry, sat beside Martin at the table and entirely forgot his accustomed appetite for griddle cakes in listening to the story of the _Myra’s_ adventures since she left us.

Naturally, when the three hot and weary cooks came out of the kitchen, the whole story had to be repeated in great detail for their benefit.

It seems the _Myra_ nearly did founder that awful night of the hurricane. She snapped off one of her masts--which we later saw floating near the reef--and lost her deck railing and all her life boats. She sprang a bad leak, too, and had to put in at Barbadoes for repairs. Well, from then on, everything seemed dead against the poor _Myra_.

As Martin put it, “We had head winds, and _no_ winds, and another hurricane. And the water supply gave out, and two of the crew came down with what we were afraid first was yellow fever, and they quarantined us when we put into Bahia, finally. But we kept a-going--there wasn’t nothing else for us to do, and we got to Monte at last, and delivered our cargo. If we’d been a single day later the consignees wouldn’t have accepted it, for another ship was expected with the same stuff in a few days, and they’d about given us up for lost, as they hadn’t received the cable from Bahia.”

Of course, then, nothing would do but we must all go out and look the _Myra_ over, after her hard-luck adventurings, and afterward, Martin must come back, to Planter’s House with us, and spend the night. On his part, he was as anxious to hear what we’d been doing on the Island, as we had been to have his story, only so far we hadn’t given him a chance to do anything but answer questions.

When he heard our plan to make our home permanently on Sunset Island, for the next few years, Martin looked very thoughtful for a while, and later came rather shyly to Aunt Mollie and begged her to ask the “Cap’n” to let him--Martin--remain as part of our little pioneer colony. He declared that last voyage had given him all of the sea he wanted for years to come, and he’d love to work in a garden again, ashore. He told us he’d been born a farm boy, and he guessed it was “back to the farm for him,” after this.

Of course Aunt Mollie did as he wanted, and pleaded his cause with Uncle Joe so successfully that Martin was forthwith transferred to shore duty, as he called it, and Uncle Joe appointed him his own special representative on Sunset Island, when the _Myra_ sailed in the due course of events, for the North with Uncle Joe himself on board, and the Jennings family and one Gay Annersley (who has used the word “I” a disgraceful number of times in these pages) stood on the lagoon beach and waved a rather tearful goodbye.