Laughing Last, Jane Abbott [the false prince .txt] 📗

Sidney found it a little difficult to take up the fun with her erstwhile chums where she had left off. When she stopped at the Calkins’ house directly after breakfast, Mart coolly declined to go anywhere with her, and smiled scornfully at her bare legs.

“I s’pose your million-dollar friend is otherwise engaged today!”

Sidney truthfully admitted that she was. “She’s gone to Chatham with her mother to see some people they know. And I’m glad. I’ve been just dying for a good swim. Let’s go out to the Arabella this morning.”

But Mart declared she was tired of all that. In fact she was tired of doing lots of the silly things they’d been doing. She’d promised Gert Bartow to go there right after lunch.

Sidney had no choice but to go on alone in search of Lav. She was discouraged to the point of tears. Yet she knew in her heart that she deserved Mart’s coldness. She remembered how she had felt once when Nancy had deserted her for a new girl at Miss Downs’. And it had seriously threatened their friendship.

As she wandered slowly toward the town Sidney wondered what Mart and Gert Bartow were going to do. Gert Bartow was a girl of nineteen at least, and much more grown up than even that. Mart had pointed her out to Sidney. Sidney wished Mart had asked her to go with her to Gert’s. She felt very lonely.

Perhaps she had spoiled everything. Pola would come back, of course, but, somehow, Pola’s glamour had faded. After all, what, besides tons of candy and quarts of sweet mixtures and much glitter, had there been to it? The sweets and the glitter and Pola’s endless confidences of “men” had left Sidney jaded and bored, though she did not know it; she did know that she was suddenly lonely for Mart and Lav and the stimulating pastimes they seemed to find always right at hand.

As she approached Rockman’s, wandering there from force of habit, she saw Lav pushing off in a dory. She ran down the wharf, hailing him.

“Oh, Lav, take me with you!” she pleaded, breathlessly.

He hesitated a moment before he swung the dory back to the wharf. Something of the look Mart had given her flashed into his eyes.

Then: “Come on if y’want to,” he answered ungraciously.

As she sat down in the bow of the boat Sidney wanted to cry more than anything else, but Lav’s dark face suddenly reminded her of what Aunt Achsa had told her. Perhaps he had been out in the sand dunes last night, lying on his face, sobbing aloud! She began chattering with resolute cheerfulness.

“Isn’t it hot this morning, Lav? Where are you going?” Lav answered shortly that he was going out to the Arabella. Sidney noticed a book in his pocket, but said nothing. She ventured other remarks concerning the activities in the bay to which Lavender answered in monosyllables, if at all.

“Oh, look, the Puritan’s in, Lav!” And even to this Lavender only grunted: “It’s been in two days!”

By the time they reached the Arabella Sidney’s remorse was yielding to a spark of indignation. Lav needn’t be quite so mad for, after all, it had been his own precious Mr. Dugald who had thrown her and Pola so constantly together! And if Lav had not hidden himself away he most certainly would have been included in all the plans. It was not fair in Lav to act so cross.

“I know you came out to read, Lav, and I’ve some thinking to do, so I’m going up in the bow and leave you quite to yourself,” Sidney said as they boarded the Arabella, and if in her tone there was something of Mart’s tartness, it may be forgiven for Sidney had been punished enough.

“I don’t care if you hang ’round,” Lav conceded. “It’s too hot to read, anyways. I thought maybe there’d be a breeze out here. What’s that?” For he had suddenly spied an object lying on the deck close to the rail as though it had dropped there from someone’s pocket.

At almost the same moment Sidney spied it, too. Both darted for it. Lavender reached it first and picked it up and examined it with frowning eyes.

“It’s a knife!” cried Sidney, at his elbow.

“Sure it’s a knife. Anybody can see that. What I want to know—”

“Let me look at it. Isn’t it Mr. Dugald’s?”

“No, it isn’t Mr. Dugald’s. He hasn’t been out here for a week. And that knife wasn’t here yesterday for I’d a’ seen it.”

“Let me look at it, Lav,” pleaded Sidney, for Lav, a curious expression on his face, had covered the knife with his hand.

“It’s funny, that’s all I got to say. I mean—how it come here.”

“Lavender Green, show me that knife this minute! You act so mysterious and I have a right to know why.”

Slowly Lavender placed the knife in Sidney’s eager hands. It was an ordinary case knife such as the fishermen carried, but Lavender pointed to two initials that had been carved on the case.

“J.S.”

“J.S.” repeated Sidney; then she cried: “Why—J.S.! That’s Jed Starrow!”

“Sure it’s Jed Starrow!”

“But how did it get on the Arabella?”

“That’s what I’d like to know.”

“He’s been on the Arabella, Lav!”

“Or someone of his gang.”

“Isn’t that funny? What would he come here for?”

Lavender was silent. And Sidney, staring at him as though to read from his face some explanation, suddenly fell silent, too. The secret that Cap’n Davies had laid upon her weighed heavily. She wished she could tell.

“Sid, I haven’t played square,” Lavender suddenly blurted out, flushing. “We promised to tell one another if any one of us found out anything and I did—and I didn’t tell!”

Lavender’s admission faded beside the fact that he knew something.

“Oh, what?” Sidney cried.

“I wasn’t going to tell you. I thought you didn’t care anything about the pirates any more. And the laugh’s sort o’ on me, anyway, because I thought we were all crazy to suspect Jed Starrow.”

“Tell me quick, Lav,” commanded Sidney, quivering with excitement.

Lav leaned against the rail. To tell his story meant confessing his state of mind.

“I guess I’ve been sore because you and Mr. Dugald fooled ’round with those new folks. Jealous. I get that way lots of times—all hot inside because I’m different. And I go off somewhere alone and stay there until I fight it down.”

“I know, Lav. Aunt Achsa told me. Did you go to the dunes?”

“One night I did. Stayed there all night. But one evening I went out on the breakwall. There’s a place out there where the rocks are piled so’s to make a cave. I used to play there a lot when I was a little kid. I crawled into it. And I hadn’t been there very long when I heard somebody talking—two men. They were up close so’s I heard everything they said.”

“And what did they say, Lav? Oh, tell me quick!”

“I could only get scraps of it. I didn’t dare look, I didn’t dare move. But one fellow called the other Jed. I heard ’em say something about ‘risk’ and a ‘stranger from Boston asking too many questions ’round Rockman’s to be healthy,’ and Jed Starrow—I’m dead sure it was his voice—said, sort of blustering like, ‘Let them search the Puritan! They won’t find anything on her now!’ And the other fellow answered him: ‘There’s too much in this, Jed, to take any chances.’ That’s what they said, Sid, and then they went on.”

“Oh, Lav, they’re pirates!”

“Well, not exactly pirates, but they’re up to something that’s sure. Maybe they’re rum-runners. There’s a lot of that going on. I thought you were crazy, but I guess you weren’t.”

Sidney’s lips trembled with eagerness. As long as Lavender knew what he knew she felt that she would be justified in telling him what Cap’n Davies had told her.

“It isn’t rum—Lav,” she whispered, “It’s diamonds!”

“Diamonds! Oh,