Warning Hill by John P. Marquand

Hill epitomized a phase of life itself. In the village and on the hill that age-old struggle ran. Every one was building barriers, struggling, pushing to keep their children safe, in some vain hope that walls would make them better.
    Time and again the Picts had come to Warning Hill. There were always boys with spirit enough to break away and to attempt to right the world. Tommy had been there once himself. They had sallied upon the gate like Crusaders skirmishing before the Holy City, six of them, barelegged and muddy, with Mal Street in the lead. Mal Street had been great that day, inspiring every one with his cool courage.
    â€œHold steady till you see the whites of his eyes!” Mal told them, and he had hit the man in gaiters square on the nose with a rotten apple before they broke for cover.
    The waves were striking on the bottom of the skiff—slap-slap—as Tommy held his course to Warning Hill. Now and then a gust of wind would take the skiff with a sudden force, and would make the water sing as water must have sang since the beginning of all time.
    â€œLay aft there!” Tommy called. “And ease the sheets!”
    It was not hard to play the game. You could easily think that there was some one also aboard; his footsteps sounded in the slapping of the water. Tommy could see his own house, over astern to port, gaunt and gray with the elms about it. He could see a smashed window in the cupola and broken shutters, and clothes hanging to dry by the old carriage house, and the bushes near the choked old garden by the beach. His house and everything he knew was slipping too far astern for help. The yellow skiff was very near to Warning Hill.
    The houses on the hill had grown very large, all of them like castles. On a stretch of green above him was one of brown rough stones that was larger than the others. Its gray slate roof was a mass of pointed towers. There were balconies in front of its windows, and the lawn came down from it in great long steps. Tommy looked hastily at the shore line. Everywhere before him were the rocks and rough water.
    â€œLook forward!” called Tommy Michael. It was pleasant to feel that some one else was there.
    â€œReady about!” called Tommy. “Stand by to beach her!”
    Though Tommy was pretending, he could manage a small boat. It was pleasant having things both make-believe and real, because you could slip from one to the other as you pleased. Tommy had seen a place to land where the rocks had dropped away to leave a little strip of sandy beach with a stretch of marsh grass behind it. A minute later Mal Street’s skiff nosed into the sand with a flapping sail, and Tommy was shoving in the anchor. Tommy was very careful to make no unnecessary noise. He was sharing the feelings of greater men than he. Balboa would have understood, and old De Soto and Champlain, that Tommy was a brother to them all, as he walked through the marsh grass of a country, where fiddler crabs scuttled to their holes before his step.
    Tommy walked forward a little way and stopped, but no one was in sight. There was only the lapping of the harbor waves. Now that he was off the water, the sun was very warm.
    â€œStand by the ship,” said Tommy. “I’m going on ahead.”
    Nothing answered. Only the waves were splashing on the shore. Before him was a small building, whose door sagged half open, and whose windows were gaping like sightless eyes. Its empty stillness startled him, and a curious something besides, as if something was there, though nothing was there at all. The house, the beach and the marsh made a solitary lonely country, because a row of poplars cut it off from the mainland, like a wall.
    â€œStand by the ship!” said Tommy. “I’m going through those trees!”
    Of all the sights that Tommy Michael was to see, he could never recall one finer than the one which met his eyes.

IX
    Tommy was standing upon a lawn. It was magnificently green