Us and the Bottleman | Page 2

Jerry pounced again,--I was laughing too hard to,--and said:
"It's not olives, silly; it's an abbreviated French way of saying how old
we are."
Then I had to pounce on him, and tell him it was Latin, as he might
know by the diphthong. By that time Greg had written "Gregory
Holford, Ate 8," across the bottom, very large, and Jerry said he might
as well have put 88 and had done with it. We folded the paper up in the
tinfoil that the chocolate came in and jammed it into the bottle and
pounded the cork in tight with a stone. Greg was all for chucking it
immediately, but Jerry said it would have a better chance if we dropped
it right into the current from the ferry going home. So we cocked the
bottle up on a rock and went back to the pirate-cave-entrance place to
finish a game of smugglers.
Wecanicut is a nice place to smuggle and do other dark deeds in, and I
don't believe we'll ever be too old to think it's fun. This time we cut the
rest of the tinfoil into roundish pieces with Jerry's jackknife, and
stowed them into a cranny in the cave. They shone rather faintly and
looked exactly like double moidores, except that those are gold, I think.
We also borrowed Aunt Ailsa's hatpin with the Persian coin on the end.
By running the pin down into the sand all the way, you can make it
look just like a goldpiece lying on the floor of the cave. She is a very

obliging aunt and doesn't mind our doing this sort of thing,--in fact, she
plays lots of the games, too, and she can groan more hollowly than any
of us, when groans are needed.
This time we didn't ask her to, because she was reading a book by H.G.
Wells to Mother, and anyway all our proceedings were supposed to be
going on in the most Stealthy and Silent Secrecy. The moidores and the
Persian coin were all that was left of an enormous lot of things which
the villainous band had buried,--golden chains, and uncut jewels, and
pots of louis d'ors, and church chalices (Jerry says chasubles, but I
think not). Greg and Jerry had dragged all these things up from the
edge of the water in big empty armfuls, and we stamped the sand down
over them. It really looked exactly as if the tinfoil moidores were a
handful that was left over. Greg was just giving the final stamp, when
Jerry crooked his hand over his ear and said:
"Hist, men! What was that?" They were having artillery practice down
at the Fort, and just then a terrific volley went sputtering off.
"'Tis a broadside from the English vessel!" Jerry said. "We are
pursued!"
We crept out from the cave and made off up the shore as fast as
possible. Jerry went ahead and jumped up on a rock to reconnoiter. He
did look quite piratical, with my black sailor tie bound tight over his
head and two buttons of his shirt undone. Greg had his own necktie
wrapped around his head, but several locks of hair had escaped from
under it. He always manages to have something not quite right about
his costumes. He has very nice hair--curly, and quite amberish
colored--but it's not at all like a pirate's. I poked him from behind to
make him hurry, for Jerry was pointing at a big schooner that was
coming down the harbor. We all lay down flat behind the rock until she
had gone slowly around the point. We could see the sun winking on
something that might have been a cannon in her waist--that's the place
where cannon always are--and of course the captain must have been
keeping a sharp lookout landward with his spy-glass.
"Eh, mon," said Jerry, when the schooner had passed, "but yon was a

verra close thing!"
That's one of the worst things about Jerry,--the way he mixes up
language. We'd been reading "Kidnapped," and I suppose he forgot he
wasn't Alan.
"Silence, dog!" I said, to remind him of who we were. "Very like she's
but hove to in the offing, and for aught you know she's maybe sending
ashore the jolly-boat by now."
"Then let's go to the end of the point and have a look," Greg suggested.
He doesn't often make speeches, because Jerry is apt to pounce on him
and tell him he's "too plain American," but I think it isn't fair, because
he hasn't read as many books as Jerry and I. So I hurried up and said:
"Bravely spoke, my lad; so we will, my hearty!" And we crawled and
clambered along till we came to the end of the point where it's all