High Tide at Noon by Elisabeth Ogilvie Read Free Book Online Page A

across the quiet harbor waters, among the moorings where only punts and dories lay; the power boats were all at work. This was a spell of fine weather and nobody was lazy on Bennett’s Island when the Closed Season was so near. Nils rowed standing up, pushing on the oars with long, effortless movements. Joanna looked past him at the shore and saw Gunnar still standing there, a squat black figure against the sun, somehow frightening. . . . She felt gooseflesh on her arms and then laughed at herself.
    â€œI didn’t mean to slat around,” she said meekly. “I suppose he’ll take it out on you.”
    â€œHe’d been taking it out on me for an hour before you came along.” Nils grinned. “Nothing new. He’s on the prod, that’s all. Drivin’ Kris and David and me from hell to breakfast.”
    â€œHe’s always taking a dig at my father. I won’t have it.” But a little thread of fear ran through her anger. “Nils, you don’t think my father’s soft, do you?”
    â€œYour father’s all right. You know Grampa. He ran away to sea when he was eleven, and seafaring men were hard tickets in those days. So he thinks anybody that doesn’t raise his kids with a Bible in one hand and a whip in the other is a fool.”
    â€œWe had the Bible, but the most we ever got for lickings was a lath across our seat.”
    â€œRemember how you used to go out and sit on the woodpile and howl?”
    She grinned at him. “And you’d come up to get Owen, and if you came anywhere near me I’d throw kindling at you!”
    They were both laughing then, and the peapod was outside the harbor at last, so they couldn’t see Gunnar on the beach any more. Now the boat seemed to leap forward over the bright water, and a sort of exultation possessed Joanna, made up of the crystalline sun­washed coolness of the morning, the whole blue and shining world around them, the rhythm of Nils’ body as the oars swung the peapod with arrow-swiftness toward the first black and yellow buoy.
    Nils shipped his oars and gaffed the buoy with one quick swoop. The boat rocked gently, in the cool dark shadow of the rocky shore, while the warp fell in wet coils at his feet; at last he caught the rope bridle and pulled the trap aboard. Balancing it on the low gunwale, his hands in the thick white cotton gloves scraped off the sea urchins and opened the door. There were innumerable crabs to be thrown overboard, and there were four lobsters. Three of them he tossed into the tub without a second look; the fourth one he measured with the gauge, and tossed it overboard.
    â€œGood start, Jo,” he said briefly, as he took out the bait bag and strung a fresh one, bulging with herring, into place with a swift stabbing gesture of the bait needle. “You’re no Jonah.”
    â€œIt doesn’t look as if you’ve been bothered.”
    He pushed the trap overboard, letting the warp play through his fingers, and gave her a sidewise glance. “Who’s been bothered?”
    â€œCharles.” The buoy splashed overboard, and Nils began to row again. “He wants to take a gun with him,” Joanna added.
    â€œIt might come to that yet,” Nils said.
    The morning went on, brave with luminous skies and the glitter of sunshine across the water, the dazzle of gulls’ wings and the sound of them as they came down in a shrieking rush when Joanna shook out the old bait bags. Nils hauled close to the shore, under the shadow of the high wooded places, and over the ledges whose rockweed swayed gently in the water like miniature meadows in the wind.
    Their conversation was brief, but entirely satisfactory, the sparse words of two friends who can be as companionable in silence as in talk. When Joanna was thirsty, she drank from the water bottle; toward noon they shipped oars and ate mammoth sandwiches of beef and homemade bread, while the water chuckled and