With that he went up the companionway and, not noticing the greeting of Captain Tanner, dropped into his yellow dory that swung and bumped against the Rosan’s side. Swiftly he rowed to the Nettie B. and clambered aboard, bellowing orders to get up sail. In fifteen minutes the schooner was on the back track under every stitch of canvas she carried.
Bijonah Tanner stared blankly after the retreating Nettie. Then, knowing that his daughter had been with Nat, dropped down into the little cabin.
He found Nellie seated in the chair by the little table, and weeping.
CHAPTER XIV
A DISCOVERY
Taken aback as he had been by the strange doings of Nat’s schooner, his dismay then was a feeble imitation of the panic that smote him now. It had long been a favorite formula of Bijonah’s that “A schooner’s a gal you can understand. She goes where ye send her, an’ ye know she’ll come back when ye tell her to. She’s a snug, trustin’ kind of critter, an’ she’s man’s best friend because she hain’t got a grain o’ sense. But woman!”
Here Bijonah always ended, his hands, his voice, and his sentence suspended in mid air.
Now he was baffled completely. Here was a girl who was deeply in love, crying. He tiptoed cautiously to the deck again and stole forward to the galley as though he had been detected in a suspicious action.