The Sea Flower by Ruth Moore

Author:Ruth Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Islandport Press
Published: 2024-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Arvid rowed thoughtfully ashore. A skiff was all right, nice steady boat, but heavy. Rowing one against a running tide took it out of a man, He wished he could have taken his punt.

The damn gulls was into them spilt groceries. As he neared shore, Arvid hollered and splashed with his oars, and a cloud of them flew up. Then he was sorry he’d hollered, because that youngster must be around there somewhere in the hinterlands.

And I already scared him to death, hollering, when I come out of my nightmare. Poor little duffer, if I go hunting him now, he’ll think I’m chasing him.

Arvid was worried about the boy. There were too many places even a grown man could fall into, running headlong around those woods—cellar holes, open wells. So never mind the gulls in the groceries; he’d have to start hunting right away. But as he landed on the beach and pulled the skiff up a little, dropping her anchor so she wouldn’t drift away, he caught a glimpse through the bushes of the pink lace underpants, just disappearing.

Well, good. The kid wasn’t in a hard way, he was still walking around. So first things first. Take the groceries up to the house. Open up windows and doors to let good new air through; build a fire in the stove. Then fix a gol-rorious old beef stew with a lot of onions and leave it in the oven. That youngster might be scared—and a lot of good I could do, chasing him—and he might be lost; but in time, what he’d be most was hungry. Where he would come to, seemed likely, was a lived-in house, smoke coming out of the chimney, and the smell of something good cooking.

He went up the bank to the clump of bushes, where, when he had left the island a few weeks ago, he had hidden his wheelbarrow. Each time he went to the mainland, he did this. While it wasn’t far up to the house, still, if the wheelbarrow was down to the shore, you didn’t have to go up and get it, make two trips. He didn’t have to hunt far in the clump to find out that the wheelbarrow was gone. There was the place where it had been, he could see the mark of the wheel.

“Oh, blast it and damn it,” he said. He backed out of the bushes, glancing upward into the treetops. Yup, there she was. Them damn Snorri twins again.

The wheelbarrow, being painted bright red, was easy to see. Someone had tied a rope to the wheel, flung the end over a lower limb of a big spar spruce tree, and hoisted the barrow up to it. It was a senseless trick, because they hadn’t bothered to cut off the end of the rope—they had just tied it to the trunk of another tree. All Arvid had to do was to untie the rope and let the wheelbarrow down. He did so, thinking disgustedly that brighter

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