“No good yet,” he said. “But it soon will be.”
They walked round the tarn, gathered two big bundles of fallen sticks in the outskirts of the wood beyond it, carried them up to the barn and spent a long time breaking them up into short handy lengths and piling them neatly just inside.
“Everything’s ready now,” said Dick. “Let’s go down and get tea over.” They were on the point of starting down the track to Dixon’s Farm when they were reminded of those six strangers yet again.
“There’s that boat,” said Dick, taking a last look down at the lake with his telescope. “There, turning into that bay.”
For some minutes they watched, but most of the bay below the white farm-house was hidden by the pine trees on a little rocky headland. Then, suddenly, Dick spoke again. “Coming up the field,” he half whispered. “Just below the house. Waving at something . . . There’s the boat going away out of the bay. Only two in it. Both red caps . . . ”
Dorothea put a hand on the telescope for a moment and then remembered that she could never see through it.
“Where are they now?”
“Disappeared behind the house. Let’s go up into the observatory. Just for one minute.”
They ran up the steps and into the loft. Dick crouched on the floor by the big opening at the end of it and steadied his telescope against the wall.
“Dot,” he cried suddenly. “They do come from that house. Look at this end, two windows one above another. Two of them are hanging out of that top window.”
“What’s the good of thinking about them?” said Dorothea. “They might as well be in some different world.”
Dick started so sharply that he almost dropped his telescope.
“Why not? Why not?” he said. “All the better. Just wait till dark and we can try signalling to Mars.”
“To Mars?” said Dorothea.
“Why not?” said Dick. “Of course they may not see it. And even if they do see it they may not understand. A different world. That makes it all the more like signalling to Mars.”
“We’re going to be late for Mrs Dixon’s tea,” said Dorothea, and a moment later they were down those steep stone steps and hurrying home. As she ran down the cart track beside him, Dorothea was thinking. You never knew with Dick. He always seemed to be bothering about birds, or stars, or engines, or fossils and things like that. He never was able to make up stories like those that came so easily to her, and yet, sometimes, in some queer way of his own, he seemed to hit on things that made stories and real life come closer together than usual.
“It’s worth trying,” she panted, just as they were coming to the gate into the main road.
“What is?” said Dick, who was already thinking of quite other stars. What constellations could they look for? He wished he could keep the star map in his head. But anyway, they would take the book with them, and have a lantern to read it by, in case the firelight was too flickery.
“Signalling to Mars,” said Dorothea.
CHAPTER II
SIGNALLING TO MARS
AN HOUR LATER they were climbing the cart track again. Dick had the star-book with him, and the telescope. Dorothea was carrying the lantern.
Mrs Dixon had made no fuss at all about letting them have a lantern when they asked for it, though what they could want with going up to the old barn after sunset was more than she could tell. Stars? Couldn’t they see stars as well and better from the farmyard, or from the scullery window for that, and keep warm into the bargain?
“You must have an observatory on the top of a hill,” Dick had explained, “so as to get a larger horizon.”
“Get along with you, you and your horizons,” Mrs Dixon had laughed, shaking the kitchen table-cloth into the fire. Old Silas had got a spare lantern for them and put a drop of oil it it. And Dick and Dorothea, astronomer and novelist, had hurried out into the winter evening.
They lit the lantern almost at once. It seemed a pity not to carry a lighted lantern when they could and, though there was still a little light in the sky, the lantern made things much darker. The stars were already showing.
“There’s Cassiopeia,” said Dick. “It’s supposed to be her chair, but it’s no good trying to see it like a chair. None of the constellations are like what they’re supposed to be. Even the Plough does just as well for a wagon or a bear.”
But Dorothea did not feel like talking while they were going up the hill at such a pace.
They came to the barn and stood outside it high on the hillside. Dick was searching the skies while Dorothea peered down into the darkness of the valley.
“What about Mars?” she reminded him at last. “Have they had their tea?”
“Oh, them?” said Dick, and for a moment left the constellations to revolve unwatched. “Look there. Those’ll be the lights of that farm-house. Hide the lantern in the barn and we’ll be able to see better.”
Dorothea put the lantern well inside the doorway and hurried out again into the dark. Dick had already got his telescope trained on those lights away below them.
“It’s all right,” he said. “One of those lights is the downstairs window at this end of the house. I can just see the end wall, all white. There must be some other light quite near it. There you are. There it is. Someone moving about with a lantern.”
“Well, they won’t be going to bed yet. If it’s them. But that youngest one probably goes to bed pretty early.”
It felt very queer to be up there, high above everything, guessing at those strange lives so far away.
“Anyhow,” said Dick, “it’s no good thinking about them till there’s a light upstairs in that room they were putting their heads out of. Let’s look at the real stars. We’ve got to get that fire going. It’ll be all right in that corner round the steps. Then you can stay by the fire and see what the book says, and I can come round this side so as not to be bothered by the light.”
They were not very good at lighting a fire, and instead of doing it in the proper way with a handful of dry grass or the tiniest twigs, Dick, after a last regretful look by lantern-light at the picture of the rings of Saturn, took the paper wrapper off the star-book and gave it to Dorothea.
“It doesn’t really matter,” he said, “because the same picture is inside the book as well.”
“It’s not like lighting a fire in a proper grate,” said Dorothea. “But the paper’ll make it much easier.”
It did, and in a few minutes they had a fire burning in the corner behind the steps. Smoke poured into their eyes, and reading seemed impossible. But presently the fire burnt clearer, and Dorothea crouched beside it to keep warm, and looked at the star-book in the light of the fire and the lantern.
“Get the chapter on the January sky,” said the astronomer, who was keeping the stone steps between himself and the glare.
Dorothea turned rapidly over the pages. “Got it,” she said.
Dick was staring up into the crowded sky.
“Now then,” he said. “I’ve got the Plough all right. Almost over that farm. And I’ve got the Pole Star, and Cassiopeia on the other side of it, almost opposite the Plough. What are the other ones it tells us to look out for? Skip the poetry.”
“Taurus,”