“Well, go and get that, and come right back; don’t take any bait, nor stop to fish.”
Charlie rowed down to the fishing-ground, where he found the buoy floating on the glassy surface of the water, with a great mass of kelp, as large as the floor of the house, fast to it; he took out his knife, and cut them off from the ropes, and watched them as they floated away with the tide.
Charlie thought the southerly wind would come in at twelve o’clock, and save him the labor of rowing home; so he made his canoe fast to the buoy, determined to wait for it. Whether it was due to the reaction consequent upon the terrible excitement he had of late passed through, the beauty of the day, or a mingling of both, he felt deliciously lazy; so, taking his birch-bark dinner-box from the little locker in the stern of the canoe, he stretched himself upon the oars and seats, and with a piece of bread and butter in his fist, began to meditate. “What a strange thing the sea is!” thought he; “three days ago I lay in this very spot, fastened to this very rope, in such an awful sea, expecting to sink every moment, and now it is just as smooth as glass; and where it was breaking feather white against the Bull you might now lie right up to the rocks.”
Charlie was very different from John; he was more thoughtful; liked to be studying out and contriving something. John was more for mere excitement and adventure.
The southerly wind now came, and Charlie began to haul in his cable; but he found that the two canoes, riding to it in the gale, had bedded it so well in the sand that he could not start it.
“I’m no notion of working to-day,” said he; “contrivance is better than hard work.”
It was now flood tide; he pulled the canoe right over her anchor, hauled in the slack of the cable as tight as he could, and made it fast, then stretched out in the sun, and returned to his bread and butter. As the tide made, the cable grew tighter and tighter, till at last it began to draw the bows of the canoe down into the water; at length it drew her down till the water was about to run in, and Charlie began to think the anchor was under a rock, when all at once it gave way with a jump.
“I thought you’d have to come,” said he; and, putting up his sail, he went home before the light south-westerly wind.
Ben had said to Charles, when he went away in the morning, “I shall be in the woods when you come back, and I want you to bail out the big canoe, as I shall want to use her to-morrow.”
When Charles came to the beach he made his boat fast, and went to look at the big canoe. The sea had broken into her as she lay on the beach, and there was a great deal of water in her.