Well, I didn’t know what to do, nor how serious it was, and I did know it was mighty cold and wet and uncomfortable, so Catty and I huddled together and waited to see. In a few minutes our eyes got used to the dark so we could see we had drifted down onto a big schooner yacht, and the two boats were bumping and grinding together and wearing off each other’s paint. Mr. Browning and Naboth and Tom and Rameses III were running around with fenders, and somebody was yelling at us and calling us pet names, and Naboth was yelling names back.
“Hey, you fat-bellied sardine can, what you rampagin’ down on top of us fer, hey? A-scrapin’ our paint off on your dirty nose.... You gasoline-stinkin’ bum-boat!” bellowed a voice out of the dark.
“Shet up,” howled Naboth, “you slab-sided lobster pot. You ornery garbage scow. Think you kin take up all the harbor with your ol’ she-camel? Sheer off there! Sheer off, or we’ll jest up and ride right over the top of ye.”
There were all kinds of compliments, and then Mr. Browning told Tom to start the engines, and ordered Naboth to see to the anchor. We got under way, and backed off from the other boat about a hundred yards and dropped anchor again. “There,” says Mr. Browning, “hope she holds this time.” So we started to turn in again, but before we could get below Naboth and Rameses III had started a quarrel about a rope fender that had got itself dropped overboard. Naboth claimed Rameses should have held the end of the rope, and Rameses claimed Naboth just let go out of pure meanness. In a minute they had forgotten the fender and veered around to Rameses III’s coffee, which Naboth claimed was made out of shavings and varnish, and from there they touched on legs and hair and relatives and laziness, and moved on to Jonah’s whale, and how much of an iceberg floats under water, and what makes the Gulf Stream hot—and then we turned in and let them go it.
In the morning when we woke up it was still cold and drizzly, and the wind was blowing a gale, so Mr. Browning said we’d stay right there in the harbor for the day and wait to see if the weather didn’t improve. It didn’t seem very bad in there, but I guess he thought the open water outside would be pretty rough. There was a lot of it out there to get rough, anyhow. So we got fixed to loaf all day and wait for the wind to go down.
There were some books down in the cabin, and I got settled to read, but Catty wasn’t in a reading humor. He wanted to do something, and finally he made up his mind to take the little dinghy and row ashore. So I went along with him. We walked all over Newport in the rain, and bought some post cards to send home, and some candy. Then we stopped in the yacht club station, and there was a book on the table called Lloyd’s Register of Yachts, or something like that, and we looked in it, and there was the name of every yacht in America with its dimensions and who owned it. We found our boat, and then Catty says, “Let’s see who owns the Porpoise.” So we looked it up; it belonged to Jonas P. Dunn.
“H’m,” says Catty, “that’s the man the telegram went to.”
“So it is,” says I.
“Then he’s the boss pirate,” says Catty, “and these fellows here are only hired men, like you might say.”
“Sure,” says I, “but what of it?”