"I'll tell you what," Tommy said, "we'll chuck the cottage idea and go aboard; then tonight, Gates, you pipe the crew—if that's the nautical term—whereupon I'll hold a two-hour inquest over our deceased war, on condition that we bury the subject forever more. We came down here to lose the last eighteen months of our lives, Gates, not keep 'em green. Maybe you don't know it, but we're after the big adventure!"
His eyes twinkled as he said this, and his face was lighted by a rare smile that no one possessed more engagingly than Tommy. While he treated the probability of an adventure with tolerant amusement, such was his inherent love of it and so developed was his capacity for "playing-true," that he sometimes made me think almost anything might turn up. I was quite unaware that my mother had written him, or that he, in return, had promised to keep her fully advised of my improvement—a state which was already beginning.
"I carn't see how you help talking of it, sir—all that gas, and liquid fire, and bursting shells," Gates stared at him in perplexity.
"It's an effort, but I refuse to turn phonograph like some of the old timers—not that I love 'em any less for it, Lord knows!" Then he began to laugh, and turned to me, adding: "One of the first things I did after getting home was to drop in on a very dear gentleman who's been a friend of our family since the Ark. He came at me with open arms, crying: 'Well, Thomas, sit right down and tell me about your experiences!' I side-tracked that—for I hate the word. We didn't go over for experiences! But he wouldn't be denied. 'Try to think,' he commanded. 'Why, Thomas, old as I am, I remember when Stonewall Jackson struck that brilliant blow——' and you can shoot me for a spy, Jack, if he didn't keep me there five hours while he fought the entire Civil War! No sir-ee! After tonight, never again!"
But Tommy's talk, to which the crew listened in rapt attention, consumed nearer six than two, or even five hours. These men were hungry for authentic first-hand information—being too old to have sought it for themselves.
It must not be inferred that the Whim's crew consisted of the ancient and decrepit. More than once my father had said that if ever he should get in a tight place there was no band of six he would rather have at his back than this one headed by Gates; nor did he except Pete, the prince of cooks. Yet who, by the wildest stretch of fancy, could have contemplated tight places or dangers as the trim yacht rode peacefully at anchor an eighth of a mile off our dock at smiling Miami? To every man aboard such things as death and the shedding of blood had ceased with the armistice, and Gates would have taken his oath, were it asked of him, that our course pointed only toward laughing waters, blue skies, and emerald shore-lines.
Early next morning we were under way when Tommy pounded on my stateroom door, challenging me to a dip overboard. There was a glorious joy in his voice, as far reaching as reveille, that found response in the cockles of my heart. Gates, never happier than when standing beneath stretched canvas, hove-to as he saw us dash stark naked up the companionway stairs and clear the rail head-first, but he laid by only while we had our splash and continued the course southward the moment our hands grasped the gangway.
"We're cruising, not swimming," he said bluntly, as we reached the deck. "But I'll say this," he called after us, "you're both in about as fine condition as men get to be. I'll give that to the Army!" Which was true, except for the fact that I might have been pronounced overtrained. Tommy and I were as hard as nails, our skin glowed like satin—but, better than this, his spirit was quick with the love of living, charged with a contagion that had already begun to touch my own.
Half an hour later he mumbled through a crumbling biscuit:
"If Pete ever cooked better grub than this it was in a previous incarnation!"