High Tide at Noon Read Online Free PDF Page A

the bushes with a pack of gormless idiots who spent most of their spare time bragging. Nils was different. He could have ten women on the string without anyone knowing it.
    He caught her look, and winked. “Hey, Hugo,” she interrupted her cousin, who was now rather flushed of cheek and bright of eye. “Who is it this time?”
    Since Joanna was one of the gang, he told her cheerfully, and she grinned at him, the dimple deep in her brown cheek. “You want to know what Charles said about her?”
    â€œJo, are you aboard?” She heard her father’s voice so suddenly that she caught her breath and choked violently on a mouthful of smoke. Owen pounded her back. Nils deftly popped a stick of gum into her mouth. An instant later she came out of the cuddy and climbed on to the wharf where her father stood.
    He looked down at her sternly. “Joanna, run along home. The shore’s no place for a girl.”
    â€œI was just going, Father.”
    â€œAnd spit out that gum.”
    â€œYes, Father.”
    For a moment his hand rested on her shoulder, and the smile in his eyes came warmly to life across his face. “Too bad you couldn’t have been a boy, I guess. But your mother and I like our girl.”
    She ducked her cheek to touch his fingers. In this moment of rare closeness she dared to say it. “Father, why can’t a girl have a boat of her own? Even just a punt?”
    â€œI never thought much about it, Joanna. A boat’s a funny plaything for a girl to want. And don’t you ever think about new dresses?” He glanced at Philip’s faded blue shirt. “Or are you going to wear your brothers’ clothes all your life?”
    She straightened, flung up her chin. “I’ll wear ’ em all summer as long as I have to dress up all winter, by God!”
    â€œWatch your tongue, my girl,” he warned her, but his mouth twitched. He had always been proud of her spirit.
    Sigurd Sorensen, a big, yellow-maned Viking, came across the wharf with Charles.
    â€œSteve, you been down there an’ looked at my wheel? Looks shacked to me. Hi, Jo.”
    â€œThat’s Steve’s sixth boy,” said Charles. “Hello, mutt.”
    She nodded gravely at them and walked away. If she had to go home and do the dull and senseless tasks allotted to girls in this life, and leave behind her the good solid talk of men, about boats and wheels and engines and the summer fishing, at least she could take the long way home.
    In the flood of afternoon sunshine the village lay asleep, the harbor a wide blue mirror at its feet. The season was always late on the Island, so now in June tall old lilacs, purple and white, bloomed fragrantly against silvery shingles or white clapboards. And everywhere the grass was green, crossed and recrossed by narrow paths fringed with chicory and wild caraway’s fragile blossom; where the grass grew tall, it was starred with daisies.
    Joanna crossed the field by the well, and turned by Gunnar’s spruces into the lane that led past the long low clubhouse under the trees, where the suppers and dances were held; then it led her into the big sunshiny space, drifted with daisies and the occasional fire of Indian paintbrush, where the empty Whitcomb place dreamed against a wooded hillside, and swallows swooped toward her with their shrill little cries. The path turned away from the house to trail mysteriously through another bit of woods into the Bennett meadow.
    But Grandpa Bennett’s apple orchard grew in these woods, and it was here that Joanna stopped at last. For the orchard was in bloom. Here, with the great spruces towering in dark and immobile silence around them, the sunlight streamed across boughs heavy with pink and white blossom; the little trees stood knee-deep in the tall grass. A cuckoo glided without a sound into the shadows.
    Joanna stood taut as an arched bow. She might have been completely alone on the Island, in