CHAPTER IV
The bad weather kept up all the next day, but by night the wind went down, and next morning after that it was warm and fine. Mr. Browning got us up mighty early, because he had planned with Mr. Topper to try to sneak out at daylight and so dodge the Porpoise. We got up the anchors as quietly as we could and off we went, and no sign of life aboard the enemy ship. It was fine, but as we came out of the harbor we found out that the sea doesn’t always go down the minute the wind does. There was a big sea running, a sort of enormous swell, and our course was right in the trough of it. I was kind of scared at first when I saw those waves.
Why, when we got on top of one and looked down, it seemed as if we were a hundred feet in the air, and when we slid down between two waves, with one of them racing right down onto us, it seemed as if we were in a valley and one of the sides was sure to fall right over on us and finish us. But the motion was so easy and the waves were so big, that it got to be real pleasure, like sliding down hill. There didn’t seem to be a bit of danger, though we could see where the waves dashed against the rocks on the shore and the spray was thrown a hundred feet into the air. It was easy to imagine what would happen to us if we got swept in there. It would be good-by Albatross and good-by Wee-wee and good-by everybody else.
But we didn’t get swept.
There weren’t many boats out, though we did see a few lobster men, and a destroyer wallowed past us going like the mischief. I noticed that Catty stuck to the after-deck, with Mr. Browning’s glasses, watching the mouth of the harbor, and every little while Mr. Topper would go back there and strain his eyes over the course we had taken. All at once Catty sung out, “Here she comes,” and sure enough, there was the black yacht, four or five miles back, just nosing between the rocks. We hadn’t dodged her worth a cent.
There was nothing to do but keep on going, so we kept. I was helping navigate and keep the log, marking down when we passed each spar and buoy and nun and lighthouse. In a few hours we passed the Hen and Chickens, and a little while afterward we sighted the lightship, and then we turned to the northward and entered Buzzards Bay. It got smoother right away, because we got under shelter of the islands that shut the bay off from the ocean, and then we picked our course up the channel and rounded the lighthouse just this side of New Bedford, and wiggled through the opening in a stone breakwater, and cast anchor in a harbor full of yachts. There must have been close to a hundred of them—all kinds. It was Padanaram, where the New Bedford Yacht Club has a clubhouse and where most of its yachts lay.
About half an hour later in came the Porpoise and dropped her anchor not far from a whopping big schooner yacht. She sort of settled down with a grunt of satisfaction that she had come up with us again. Well, we hadn’t gained anything.
Catty and I went in for a swim. It was Catty’s idea and it turned out he wanted to go in so we could swim around out of earshot and talk things over.
“The trouble with this crowd,” says he, “is that they don’t plan anything. They just run, and trust to luck to throw the Porpoise off our track. No sense in that. The enemy is planning. They’re keeping watch all the time, and they’re ready. The only way we can duck them is to plan better than they do.”
“All right,” says I, “go ahead and plan.”