Harbor (9781101565681) by Patrick (INT) Ernest; Chura Poole Read Free Book Online

come around this way!” I had not seen them now for years. What might not they do to her?
    But she made me stop by my father’s dock. She was gasping and her face was red, but with her hand like a little vise on mine she stood there staring at the ship.
    â€œWhere are the heathen?” she asked at last, in a queer choking voice.
    â€œThere.” I pointed to a small brown man with a white skullcap on his head. “There’s one. See him? Now come home!”
    â€œWait a minute, please,” she begged very softly. A moment longer she stared at him. “All right, now we’ll go,” she said.
    When I got her safe inside my gate I was in a cold sweat. This adventure, to my surprise, had been one of the most thrilling of all. And who’d have thought her an adventurer?
    Her mother died that summer while we were up in the mountains, and when we came back we found the house empty. Her father had taken her out West.
    I remember being distinctly relieved when I heard that she had gone away. For now there was something uncanny about her. It was one thing to have a mother “at death’s door.” That had been quite exciting. But to have one dead! There was something too awful about it. I would not have known what to say to the girl. And, besides, the thought suddenly entered my mind—suppose my own mother were to die!
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    We had been splendid chums, my mother and I, that long delightful summer up in the White Mountains. The mountains, we had decided together, were our favorite place to live in. “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills,” was the part of the Bible which she liked best. She loved these hills for their quiet, I loved them for the exciting adventures I had with Sue and “Stouty,” the son of the farmer with whom we stayed. But these adventures were of a kind that my mother warmly approved of for me. They were not like those on the harbor.
    An adventure to climb with Stouty and Sue up through the resinous branches of an enormous pine on the mountainside to the hawk’s nest in the bare top branches, snatch the eggs and smash them, while Stouty with a big thick stick would beat off the mother hawk. An adventure to clamber half the day up a bouldery path through firs and birches, looking into black caves, peeping over steep cliffs, and at last reaching the wind-swept summit to look off through miles of emptiness. An adventure, coming home from a picnic as evening was falling, to sit snug in that creaking capacious wagon which belonged to Stouty’s father, and to watch the lights and shadows that darted in and out of the pines as the lantern swung beneath our wheels.
    But even up here in the mountains the harbor reached with its cold embrace. For at night it was an adventure hurriedly to undress and bury myself in the covers in time to hear the first low rumble of “the night freight” that went by some five miles distant. It made me think of the trains on the docks, whose voices I had heard at night, and of the things I had done with Sam. I would hear the mountain engine come panting impatiently up the grade. As it reached the top I would rise from my bed and soar off into space, in one swift rushing flight through the darkness I would be there in the nick of time, I would swing on to a freight car in the way Sam had shown me, climb to the top and crouching there I would watch the dark roadway open ahead through the silent forest. Lower would sink the voice of the engine until it became a faint confused mutter. And the rest was dreamland.
    This was one of those secret games I never told my mother about—until, to my own surprise, in one of those long talks at night when she seemed drawing me to her right out through my eyes, I blurted this out. My mother wanted to know all about it. Did my hands get cold? Yes, colder and colder, as listening here in bed I heard the first muttering of the train and knew that in a few moments more I would