“Is there no end to it?” wondered Tad Butler, gazing at the scenery until his eyes ached.
“It is all very wonderful,” agreed Professor Zepplin.
“I call it tiresome,” declared the fat boy wearily. “I prefer something exciting.”
Ned suggested that he jump overboard. Stacy replied that he would were it not that he didn’t want to put his companions to the trouble of rescuing him.
The entrancing scenery continued at intervals until the evening of the second day after their unsuccessful attempt to draw out Curtis Darwood. They were now passing through Frederick Sound, bordered by spire-shaped 34glaciers that towered in the sky, pale and chaste, more than two thousand feet above the sound. Darkness fell, the sky being overcast, and the air chill, giving the passengers the shivers and sending them to their cabins below. Tad Butler and Ned Rector had clambered to the top of the deck-house and settled themselves between the two smokestacks. It was a nice warm berth and they appreciated it. They seemed far away from human habitation there.
“You said you had something to tell me this evening,” Ned reminded his companion, after a few moments of contented silence.
“Yes. It was about last night. You remember that remark of the skipper’s the other day, don’t you?”
“About what?”
“What he said about ‘Red Whiskers’?”
“Yes.”