Mitt looked. To his astonishment, a number of half-submerged apples were bobbing in the waves beside the boat. He watched them apparently climb a wave, then get left behind by it, the way floating things do. There were dozens of them—bright red and yellow water-sodden apples, all round Wind’s Road. And there were what looked like wisps of grass as well, and some almost waterlogged flowers.
“Oh, I know!” said Ynen. “Those must be the garlands from the Festival. I suppose the tide brought them out into the current.”
“No good to eat, are they?” Mitt wondered.
There was a scream of excitement from Hildy. She was pointing, jabbing her finger seaward, at something floating ahead. For a nasty second Mitt and Ynen both thought it was a drowned person. There was sodden flaxen hair and an outflung hand. Then it rolled and seemed simply a mat of white reeds.
“Can’t you see!” screamed Hildy. “It’s Poor Old Ammet!”
Wind’s Road veered and shivered in the excitement of that moment. Ynen almost let go of the tiller. Mitt ran from side to side. Whatever the differences between them, they were all three Holanders, and they knew this was the lucky chance of a lifetime.
“We’ll miss him, we’ll miss him! Hurry up, Mitt!” Hildy screamed. “Bring me the boathook!”
Mitt plunged round on Ynen and seized the tiller from him. “You go. I’ll bring her round for you.”
Ynen knew the maneuver was probably beyond him. He let go of the tiller almost before Mitt had it and shot up along the deck, snatching up the mop and the boathook as he went. He thrust the mop at Hildy, and the two of them, waving their implements, balanced jubilantly on the pointed prow. As Mitt took Wind’s Road racing past Old Ammet and then round again toward the wind, he was very much afraid either or both of them would join Old Ammet in the water. But they clung on. Mitt let the mainsail out with a long rattle, to take the speed off Wind’s Road, and she plowed on, bash-bash-bash, with waves smacking at her bows and spraying Hildy and Ynen thoroughly. When they were a few yards off the floating straw figure, Mitt turned Wind’s Road right into the wind, and she stood almost still, shaking and flapping.
Hildy and Ynen both threw themselves on their faces and lunged at Poor Old Ammet.
Their efforts were agony to Mitt. They knew nothing about how to get things out of the sea, those two. Hildy prodded. Ynen was hanging right under the bowsprit like a monkey, wasting Mitt’s accurate work by pushing Old Ammet farther and farther away. It was so clear that they were going to lose him that Mitt hitched the tiller up and set off to help. Wind’s Road promptly jigged round sideways to the waves, where the strong wind threatened to fill her sails again. Mitt saw that she could capsize that way and hurried back to the tiller.
“Flaming mind of your own, you have!” he told Wind’s Road. “Sail me or I’ll drown the lot of you—that’s you!”
That jigging gave Ynen the extra foot he needed. He managed to get a grip on Old Ammet with the boathook. Hildy planted the mop on him to steady him, and together they tossed Poor Old Ammet aboard like the stook of corn he was.
Mitt marveled that he could have taken that intricate mass of plaited corn for a drowned man. Old Ammet still had arms, legs, and a tufted head, but he was now more the shape of a starfish than a person. Most of his fine red ribbons were gone, and his face was cockeyed and blurred. He was a Poor Old Ammet indeed. All the same, they were delighted to see him. They all shouted, “Welcome aboard, Old Ammet, sir!” which they all knew was what you said. Mitt turned Wind’s Road joyfully back on her way again, while Hildy and Ynen first did an unsteady dance of triumph on the cabin roof and then set about fixing Old Ammet to the prow like a figurehead—which was the other thing you were supposed to do.
Poor Old Ammet was limp and waterlogged. It was no easy matter to make him into a figurehead. Ynen fetched rolls of twine and rope. Mitt called advice. Hildy ransacked the cabin for things which might support that weight of wet wheat. Mitt called so much advice that Hildy snapped, “Oh shut up! We all know you get Old Ammet out of the sea every year!”
There was really no answer to that. Mitt shut up, bitterly annoyed, and soothed himself by muttering, “Flaming females! They’re all the same. It goes right through.” He watched, haughtily, Old Ammet being threaded on a besom, a gilded picture rail, and two wooden spoons and then being lashed to half the door of the gilded cupboard that concealed the rose-covered bucket. Then he was tied very firmly across the bowsprit, where he lifted and fell proudly to the movements of the boat. Mitt knew he could not have done it better himself. So he said knowledgeably, “He’ll stiffen up. He’s full of salt. Mind you, he may niff a bit.” Then he gave way to honest pride. “Looks good, doesn’t he?”
Ynen and Hildy thoroughly agreed. “But,” Hildy said, “why doesn’t anyone ever find Libby Beer?” She lay down to peer under the mainsail, as if she expected to find Libby Beer just in the offing, in the other half of the gray, leaping sea.
“She’s all grapes and squashy berries,” said Ynen. “She must get waterlogged in no time. It would be a miracle if we had her, too.”
Mitt laughed and slapped the knobby pocket of his red and yellow breeches. “I clean forgot to this moment! Miracle it is. Here. Look.” He dragged the little wax model of Libby Beer out of his pocket. Like Poor Old Ammet, she was rather the worse for wear. The wax berries were flattened, with cloth marks imprinted on them, and the ribbons were muddy strings. But she could hardly have delighted Ynen and Hildy more had she been new and gay and gleaming.
“Oh, beautiful!” said Ynen. “We must be the luckiest boat in the world. May I lash her to the stern?”
“Carry on,” said Mitt.
“She’s lovely!” said Hildy, fingering Libby Beer while Ynen unrolled more twine. “I’ve always wanted one of these, but they won’t let us buy things at the stalls. Those little tiny rose hips. How did you get her?”
“While I was on the run,” said Mitt. “Lady at a stall gave her me for luck.”
“You mean she knew you were running away?” Hildy asked, reluctantly giving Libby Beer to Ynen to be tied behind the tiller.
“No,” said Mitt. He fixed his eyes on the gently heaving horizon and wished this silly female would understand what Holand was like for the likes of him. “She found out I was on the run just after, when the soldiers came asking. She gave me Libby Beer to cheer me up—I had a face as long as Flate Dike, see, not knowing where to go or what I dared do. Then, when the soldiers asked, she had to say she seen me. She didn’t dare not tell. That’s how people are. It’s different for you.”
Ynen considered this while he tied careful knots round the wax figure. “We’re on the run, too, now—in a way. Why is it different? If a fisherman sees Wind’s Road, he’ll tell. And I don’t feel miserable about it.”
Mitt knew Ynen had missed the point. He thought of Milda, Hobin, and the babies, of all the waterfront people who used to laugh at him selling fish, all the dozens of people he would never see again, and he was almost exasperated enough with Ynen to push him from the stern, where he was crouching, into the sea. “But you’ve not put yourself outside the law, have you?”
“Yes, we have, in another way,” Hildy said. She thought Ynen had missed the point, too, and the only way to cover it up seemed to be to let Mitt know that they had their difficulties as well. She told him about their pretended escape with the bedspread and their real escape with the pies. Mitt tried not to grin. It was all a game to them.
It did not seem to Ynen that he had missed any point. He looked admiringly at the little Libby Beer, already shiny with spray, and proudly over at Old Ammet, lifting and falling at the bowsprit, while he thought over all he now knew about Mitt. It did not add up properly. He wanted to know why. “Look here,” he said. “You must have known you’d be on the run, and what it would be like, once you’d thrown the bomb. Didn’t you make any plans to get away?”
“Were you standing there waiting to be blown up?” Hildy asked, thinking this would explain Mitt’s odd behavior on the waterfront.