“Not if she’s like all the other dories I’ve had anything to do with,” answered Dick. “She’s been out of water ever since she left her cradle, and it’ll take some time for her to soak up.”
“Oh, of course she’ll leak a little, even after a night in the water,” said Cal, with his peculiar drawl which always made whatever he said sound about equally like a mocking joke and the profoundest philosophy. “But who minds getting his feet wet in warm salt water?”
“Leak a little?” responded Dick; “leak a little? Why, she’ll fill herself half full within five minutes after we shove her in, and if we get into her to-morrow morning the other half will follow suit. It’ll take two days at least to make her seams tight.”
“Why didn’t the caulkers put more oakum into her seams, then?” queried Tom, whose acquaintance with boats was very scant. “I should think they’d jam and cram every seam so full that the boat would be water tight from the first.”
“Perhaps they would,” languidly drawled Cal, “if they knew no more about such things than you do, Tom.”
“How much do you know, Cal?” sharply asked the other.
“Oh, not much—not half or a quarter as much as Dick does. But a part of the little that I know is the fact that when you wet a dry, white cedar board it swells, and the further fact that when you soak dry oakum in water, it swells a great deal more. It is my conviction that if a boat were caulked to water tightness while she was dry and then put into the water, the swelling would warp and split and twist her into a very fair imitation of a tall silk hat after a crazy mule has danced the highland fling upon it.”
“Oh, I see, of course. But will she be really tight after she swells up?”
“As tight as a drum. But we’ll take some oakum along, and a caulking tool or two, and a pot of white lead, so that if she gets a jolt of any kind and springs a leak we can haul her out and repair damages. We’ll take a little pot of paint, too, in one of the lockers.”