Children and war -- Juvenile fiction; France -- History -- Revolution, 1789-1799 -- Juvenile fiction
Grigge gave the note to Anastasius Grubb and watched him as he read it.
He was not thinking so much about the note, or what Anastasius would do,
as he was about the man himself, for he was the oddest man that he had
ever seen; his beard was so rich and full and brown, his voice so deep,
so like a bellows, and his eyebrows so thick and frowning. After he had
read the note he looked Grigge over as though he thought he was rather
curious also. Then he destroyed the note. It was the one that Humphrey
had written, and that Dian had sent, with his own, to Grigge, first by
Raoul and then by Champar. Champar had gone back to Paris. Grigge was
watching for him every day now, and he knew that the little party of
fugitives in the forsaken barn near the city were watching, too.
Anastasius knew some French, having picked it up while carrying on his
trade back and forth, and he used it now on Grigge.
“I’ll be waiting every night with a rowboat by the willow woods three
miles south of the light-house station. I’ll keep hidden, and I’ll see
that the schooner doesn’t bring suspicion on itself. Tell them I’ll be
waiting. I’d do that and more for Humphrey Trail. We’ve played together
as lads and, please Heaven, we’ll continue friends this many a year to
come.” Anastasius relapsed into English at the last, but Grigge
understood about the willow woods and the boat. He thought of Dian and
that he would soon be seeing him and he smiled. That made him look so
different that the skipper exclaimed:
“Th’art na so ugly when tha smiles; that th’art not!”
Then Grigge left him and went back through long circuitous ways through
the country roads to the barn. He walked slowly and with the satisfied
air of one who has at last accomplished something of moment. He had
waited patiently day after day near the docks at Calais for a glimpse of
the skipper of the _Sandlass_. Champar had been gone over a week and
still there was no sign of this Anastasius Grubb, who alone, of all the
owners of fishing crafts in and around the harbor, could take safely to
England the little band of people who were at his mercy in Champar’s
uncle’s barn, near the coast.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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