The Amber Cat Page 6

  Kathy and Nick sighed with relief and got up to admire his carving. It was very bad. He had given up entirely on the R so that it read

  CHArLEY

  But Nick said, “Jolly good. Harriet’s turn.”

  “Go on, Harriet!” said Charley, holding out the knife. “Then we’ll all be together.”

  Harriet sighed but took the knife and began obediently to hack at the wall.

  “Shall I help?” asked Nick.

  “No,” snapped Harriet.

  “I only asked. You’re pushing too hard.”

  “I’m not.”

  “I just didn’t want you to cut yourself.”

  “Mind your own business,” said Harriet.

  “It is my business,” protested Nick. “It’s my knife!”

  “Keep it then!” said Harriet.

  “He doesn’t mind you borrowing it!” said Kathy, but it was too late. Harriet had dropped the knife and marched outside.

  “Oh, don’t go!” begged Charley, but she was already halfway across the beach.

  “Should we go with her?” asked Kathy worriedly.

  “She doesn’t want us,” replied Nick. “Poor little kid!”

  Harriet must have heard him because she stopped short, turned, stuck out her tongue and shouted, “I’M NOT A POOR LITTLE KID!” before scrabbling over the rocks and out of sight.

  “Harriet and Sun Dance would have got on well!” remarked Dan. “Two of a kind! Moonstruck!”

  “It’s horrible having people sorry for you,” said Robin. “Did Harriet ever come back?”

  “Yes,” said Mrs Brogan. “We did wonder ourselves if we’d see her again but she was there the next morning, waiting for us.”

  “Quick! Quick! Kathy!” shouted Harriet. “I’ve left him tied up and he hates it!” and she began to run along the beach. There was nothing for Kathy to do but follow, along the sands and over the ridge of rocks, to arrive breathless and puzzled at Harriet’s cave with Nick and Charley behind her.

  “Look what I’ve got!” said Harriet proudly.

  “Good grief!” exclaimed Nick.

  “Harriet!” said Kathy, “Where did you … ? Whose is it … ? Why have you … ?”

  “A horse!” exclaimed Charley. “Just what Kathy wanted!”

  Harriet smirked and stroked the neck of the fat grey pony she was holding by the bridle.

  “What’s he called?” asked Charley.

  “Snowy,” Harriet told him. “He’s for Kathy to ride along the edge of the sea!”

  “Oh Harriet!” said Kathy.

  “To pay you for borrowing your jumper,” explained Harriet.

  “Is he yours?” asked Nick.

  “I’ve borrowed him,” said Harriet.

  “You can’t just borrow horses!” protested Nick, laughing.

  “Snowy’s not a horse,” said Harriet. “He’s a pony.”

  “I give up,” said Nick. “Remind me never to lend you anything, that’s all. I can’t bear to think how I might get paid back.”

  “I couldn’t find a saddle,” said Harriet, ignoring Nick completely and passing the reins to Kathy.

  “Who did you borrow him from?” asked Kathy.

  “A friend,” said Harriet with dignity. “It’s quite all right.”

  “People used to get hung for horse stealing,” remarked Nick, to no one in particular.

  “Shut up!” said Harriet and Kathy and Charley all together.

  “So what did you do?” asked Dan.

  “Rode him,” said Mrs Brogan. “Of course!”

  Chapter Six

  On Thursday morning Sun Dance was sent back to school. He did not approve of this, pointing out that since he was the last member of the chickenpox club to become ill, it was very unfair that he should be the first to return to normal life.

  “Yes, but Dan and Robin were much more poorly than you,” explained his mother.

  “And it still shows where my chickenpox were,” said Sun Dance, ignoring this unsympathetic explanation and inspecting his stomach with care. “The teacher will only send me home again.”

  But Mrs Robinson had decided that Sun Dance needed something more than ghosts and space travel to occupy his thoughts and she would not relent. Sun Dance was escorted to school, where his teacher unkindly remarked that he looked the picture of health, and the chickenpox club was once more back down to two members.

  “Well, I never thought Sun Dance looked properly ill, anyway,” commented Dan, when he heard the news from Mrs Brogan.

  “He had spots,” pointed out Robin fairly.

  “Yes, but they didn’t make him ill,” said Dan. “They just made him hungry. What’ll we do this morning?”

  “Something quiet and educational,” ordered Mrs Brogan. “I’ve got to leave you to take care of yourselves while I go shopping.”

  “Not more school TV,” protested Robin.

  “Books,” suggested Mrs Brogan. “Games, puzzles, tidy your bedroom, I don’t mind what you do, so long as it’s safe and warm and doesn’t cost anything.”

  “That doesn’t leave much,” remarked Dan, but when she had gone he suddenly remembered his father’s brace-and-bit still packed in his bag upstairs. They fished it out and inspected it.

  “Is making a raft educational?” asked Dan doubtfully. “It won’t be very warm in your shed.”

  “It’ll be warm enough if we keep sawing,” said Robin. “And woodwork is educational. I used to like it when we did it at school.”

  “It was better than rotten sewing,” agreed Dan. “It’s no good them calling it textiles, we all know what it really is. My dad laughed himself sick when I had to do knitting for homework.”

  Robin grinned sympathetically, remembering the knitting homework. It was sometimes very useful having a dog. Friday had eaten his, although only after much encouragement from Robin and his mother.

  “Are you sure you’ve got enough wood to build a raft?” asked Dan.

  “Stacks,” said Robin. “All the stuff from when we pulled down the old summerhouse. It’s a bit wormy but it’s still quite solid. I thought we’d get it all sorted and sawn and drilled in the shed and take it down to the beach in sections and put it together there. Otherwise it’ll be much too heavy.”

  Dan agreed that this was a good idea, and followed Robin out to the shed.

  “I once heard a story about a man who built a boat in his cellar,” he remarked, as he wrenched out rusty nails.

  “What happened to it?” asked Robin.

  “Nothing,” replied Dan. “Of course. Shall you tell your mum we’re building a raft?”

  “I hadn’t thought,” said Robin. “Why, shouldn’t I?”

  “Just wondered,” said Dan, and added after a moment’s consideration, “I shan’t tell mine!”

  As it turned out, there was no time that day to tell Mrs Brogan anything. The moment she arrived home with the shopping, there was a ring at the doorbell and suddenly she had four bed-and-breakfast guests for the night.

  Robin and Dan, who had heard her car returning and hurried out to help her unload, surveyed the intruders with suspicion.

  “Townies,” said Dan in the privacy of the kitchen. “Silly grins and brand-new wellingtons! Whoever comes on holiday at this time of the year?”

  “Oh, there’s always a few,” Mrs Brogan replied, as she hurried between kitchen and bedrooms, carrying sheets and towels and dusters and teabags. “I wish I’d had a bit of warning, though!”

  “Tell them we can’t have them,” suggested Robin.

  “Too late,” said his mother. “Anyway, one night won’t kill us and the money will be useful for Christmas. And they only want somewhere to sleep. They said they’d be out on the beach all afternoon.”

  “What doing?” asked Dan. “Sun bathing? Paddling?”

  “Probably,” said Robin. “And then they’ll come in moaning that their feet are cold and it doesn’t look a bit like the picture they saw on a postcard.”

  “And asking wh
ere the flowers have gone,” said Dan.

  “And the donkey rides,” added Robin.

  “Shut up, you two!” said Mrs Brogan laughing.

  “Well, what are they doing, then?” asked Robin.

  “They didn’t tell me, but I notice they’ve brought metal detectors with them so it isn’t hard to guess,” replied Mrs Brogan.

  “Metal detectors?” asked Robin. “Flipping cheek! It’s our beach!”

  “It isn’t, but I take your point,” replied his mother.

  “Scavenging townies!” said Dan.

  “Rubbish!” said Mrs Brogan.

  “Metal detectors are cheating,” said Robin.

  “You wouldn’t say that if you had one,” replied Mrs Brogan.

  At school Sun Dance was having an unexpectedly good time. He found his class all embarked upon a Treasure Island project, his class teacher’s antidote to Christmas. Already the classroom walls were decorated with painted sailing ships, palm trees and parrots. Even the reading corner had been turned into a log stockade. Arithmetic was done in gold bars and pieces of eight, unruly pirates were tipped the Black Spot, and, despite the awful weather, the entire class turned out and paced the playground, chalking Xs to mark the sites of hidden treasure. Sun Dance was enchanted and by the end of the afternoon his head was full of the glory of buried gold. As soon as he arrived home, he hurried upstairs to ransack his money box. It contained eight pound coins, some pyjama buttons (banked in a time of extreme poverty in order to create an encouraging rattle) and IOUs for several million pounds signed by Perry. Sun Dance replaced the buttons and IOUs, pocketed his eight pounds and descended the stairs in three jumps, one for each flight.

  “No wonder all our ceilings are cracked!” complained his mother, appearing from the kitchen at the sound of the crashes. “Where are you going?”

  “Beach,” said Sun Dance.

  “Promise not to go out of sight of the house, then?”

  “All right,” Sun Dance agreed.

  “And don’t get cold. And don’t stay out long. It will be getting dark soon.”

  “I shall only be a minute,” Sun Dance promised.

  “Go on with you, then,” said his mother.

  Sun Dance ran across the road and down to the beach. When he arrived he turned back to look at the house and saw, as he expected, that his mother was standing on the doorstep. Sun Dance waved cheerfully and she went back inside and a moment later the lights of the living room were switched on and he knew that she was keeping an eye on him.

  In the playground at school he had learned how to hide treasure, but there the treasure had only been crosses chalked on the asphalt. A chalked cross was nothing. It would wash away with the rain. It didn’t matter if it was found or lost for ever. Only the sitting of it had been exciting.

  “Pick a place to start!” the teacher had ordered.

  Sun Dance had chosen the end of the bike sheds.

  “Choose a direction, left or right or straight ahead and count the number of paces you take.”

  Sun Dance had turned right and counted six paces.

  “Stay where you are. Find a landmark and move towards it, counting your steps.”

  Sun Dance had turned towards the lighted office windows, counted six more paces in that direction and then halted.

  “Turn to your right. Take five steps backwards (backwards steps are smaller). Mark your crosses!”

  That was how they had hidden their treasure at school.

  Sun Dance found a largish, flattish stone on the sand, took six paces to his right, turned to face a distant light flashing from the lighthouse further down the coast, took six more steps in that direction, faced right and took five steps backwards. There, at his feet, he buried his eight pound coins.

  “You’re back soon!” commented his mother a moment later. “Shut the door!”

  “I’m not stopping,” said Sun Dance. “I just came in to see if I could do it.”

  “Do what?” asked his mother, but Sun Dance was gone. A minute later he had paced out his steps and triumphantly rediscovered his money.

  “It worked!” he shouted joyfully.

  “ ’Course it did!” said a scornful voice behind him. “You only had to look for where you’d been digging!”

  Sun Dance spun round and saw that he had an audience. A familiar face was watching him; it was the girl he had warned about the dangers of the moon.

  “Or you might have followed your footprints,” said the girl.

  “Well, I didn’t,” said Sun Dance crossly.

  “I didn’t say you did,” argued the girl. “I said you might have.”

  Sun Dance glared at her, selected another stone and paced out another hiding place, being extremely careful to leave no footprints as he did so. Then he dug a hole, buried his money and smoothed the sand back afterwards. The girl hovered beside him, inspecting his smoothing.

  “If it disappears, I shall know who stole it,” said Sun Dance, and once more he ran back to the house.

  “Door!” shouted his mother.

  “I’m going back out again!” called Sun Dance.

  This time it took slightly longer to find the hiding place, but, even so, in a very few minutes he announced, “There!” and proudly held up his money.

  “All of it?” asked the girl.

  “Yes,” said Sun Dance. “Eight!”

  “Only eight?” she asked, sounding slightly disappointed.

  “I’ve got millions more at home,” said Sun Dance boastfully.

  “You can’t have.”

  “I have.”

  “I expect eight is all you’ve got.”

  “ ’Course it isn’t.”

  “Why don’t you bury some more, then?”

  “I easily could if I wanted,” said Sun Dance, forgetting that his millions were all theoretical, nothing more than grubby scraps of paper signed by Perry in red paint to look like blood.

  “I bet eight is all you’ve got,” said the girl, so scornfully that Sun Dance went home, begged for his pocket money two days in advance, buried that too, and relocated it almost straight away.

  “See!” he said to the girl.

  “You don’t leave it long enough,” she said. “You make it too easy. You could never find it again if you left it there all night.”

  “I could.”

  “You couldn’t.”

  “I shall do, then.”

  “I bet you won’t.”

  “I bet I will,” said Sun Dance and then almost changed his mind as he caught sight of Mrs Brogan’s bed-and-breakfast guests, far in the distance along the beach.

  The girl sniffed.

  “Sun Dance!” said Mrs Robinson. “If you open that door once more I shall go mad! How can I possibly keep the house warm with you letting in a howling gale every two minutes?”

  “I’m not going out again till morning,” said Sun Dance.

  The next day Mrs Brogan’s four unexpected guests ate their breakfast in the dining room while Robin and Dan consumed theirs in the kitchen and watched with deep disapproval as Mrs Brogan hurried in and out with porridge and cream, eggs, bacon, sausages, mushrooms, tea and coffee, and piles of toast.

  “Do you have to give them so much?” asked Dan.

  “I’m not giving it to them,” said Mrs Brogan. “They pay for every bite!”

  “Well, do you have to make it so nice?” persisted Dan.

  “Of course I do!”

  “Did they find anything yesterday?” asked Robin.

  “They haven’t said,” replied his mother, “but I shouldn’t think so, because they’re trying somewhere else today. They told me they would be driving further down the coast.”

  “Good riddance,” said Robin.

  “I’m sure they’re perfectly harmless.”

  “Depends what they found,” pointed out Dan ominously and Robin nodded in agreement. They hung around, getting in the way as the bed and breakfasters packed their car, until Mrs Brogan shooed them back into the h
ouse.

  “Staring is bad manners!” she told them.

  “We only wondered what they’d found,” said Robin.

  “On our beach,” added Dan.

  “Nothing,” said Mrs Brogan.

  “How do you know?” asked Robin.

  “Just an intelligent guess,” said his mother.

  “I wish you’d asked them,” said Robin.

  It was not long before Mrs Brogan was also wishing that she had asked them. Glancing out of the window, she was astonished to see the entire Robinson family, including Mr Robinson (who should have been at work) and all four children (who should have been at school), pacing the beach, excavating large holes in the sand and attempting to comfort Sun Dance, who stood in the middle of his family, alternately roaring with grief and giving orders. Mrs Brogan, accompanied by Robin and Dan, hurried outside to see what was wrong and was told the sad tale of Sun Dance’s buried treasure.

  “Apparently some girl or other watched him hide it, so I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised,” said Mrs Robinson.

  “What girl was that?” asked Mrs Brogan.

  “A horrid, rotten, thieving, burglaring girl,” said Sun Dance.

  “You don’t know for certain that she took it,” said his mother.

  “Well,” said Mr Robinson dusting damp sand off his knees, “it’s obviously gone! I give up! I shall have to go to work and these four can come with me. I’ll drop them off at their schools on my way. And if we come across that girl, I shall give her a piece of my mind!”

  “You mustn’t,” said Mrs Brogan, who had been feeling more and more guilty as they spoke. “I hate to tell you this, but I had four people staying last night who spent all yesterday afternoon out on the beach with metal detectors! They didn’t come in until after dark.”

  “Yes, and me and Dan knew right from the start that we shouldn’t trust them,” said Robin. “As soon as we saw their brand-new boots and heard the way they talked.”