“It is,” says Mr. Browning. “It’s all-fired likely. I’ll bet they’re digging now within a hundred feet of where the thing is hid that we’re going after.”
“It looks,” says Catty, “as if we’d made a mess of things.”
“It does,” says Mr. Browning, “but you can’t tell. Anyhow, it was our fault for not taking you into the secret a little more. Then you wouldn’t have got to letting your imaginations run wild all over the Atlantic Coast. But it’s done. They’re there, and what we want is there—and we’ve got to go there, and there you are.”
“We’ll think up another scheme for you,” says Catty, and then Mr. Browning laughed again. “I’ll bet you will,” says he. “Well, we might as well face the music.... Naboth, up with the anchor. Tell Tom to start the engine.”
“You’re going to run right into them?” says Mr. Topper.
“May as well be soon as late,” says Mr. Browning, and in ten minutes we were under way.
Quite a fog had come up, and before we got past the point we had lost the lightship and were navigating by compass, with our fog horn tooting like all git out. Everybody was on the lookout for buoys and stakes and bells marked on the chart, but the farther we went the less we saw, and then the engine began to act up and snort and miss, and all at once she laid down and went to sleep. It was a mess. The tide was going out, and it looked to me like we had a fine chance to be swept between Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, right out to sea—and the nearest land that was, if I guessed right, was a country by the name of Spain. I didn’t want to go to Spain.
But we didn’t go there. Tom got the engine tinkered up, and we started off again through the fog. Mr. Browning said the compass was a little off, and he wasn’t sure where we were exactly, but he kind of hoped we would come out right. Well, I can tell you I was glad when we heard a bell, and ran up to it to get its number. Then we found it on the chart and knew where we were. In another hour we were running through the rock-banked channel into Nantucket Harbor.
I was kind of disappointed at first, because from where we were it looked like a summer colony, with cottages all along the shore, but when we rounded the lighthouse into the harbor and could see the rows of old wharves, and the fishing boats, and a big Cape Cod cat making out with a bunch of fishermen aboard, I felt better. There was the old town, off our port bow, and it looked more interesting than anything we had seen yet.
But there was something that was even more interesting than the town. There, anchored off the beach with her nose pointed into the tide, was a black yacht, and her name was the Porpoise.