The Hunkydory was loaded to the point of inconvenience when, about noon, she set sail again. For it was the purpose of the boys to make their way to Quasi quickly now, stopping only long enough here and there to replenish their supply of game and fish, and they wanted to be free to stay as long as they pleased at Quasi, when at last they should reach that place, without being compelled to hurry away in search of supplies. Accordingly they bought at Beaufort all the hard bread, coffee and other such things that they could in any wise induce the dory to make room for.
“Never mind, Dory dear,” Cal said to the boat as he squeezed in a dozen cans of condensed milk for which it was hard to find a place. “Never mind, Dory dear; with four such appetites as ours to help you out, your load will rapidly grow lighter, and when we get to Quasi we’ll relieve you of it altogether.”
It was planned to establish a comfortable little camp at Quasi, to hunt and fish at will, to rest when that seemed the best thing to do, and to indulge in that limitless talk which intelligent boys rejoice in when freed for a time from all obligation to do anything else. In short, a considerable period of camping at Quasi had come to be regarded as the main purpose of the voyage. With their guns and their fishing tackle, the boys had no concern for their meat supply, but, as Cal said:
“We can’t expect to flush coveys of ship biscuit or catch coffee on tight lines, so we must take as much as we can of that sort of provender.”
About two o’clock on the afternoon of the third day of their voyage from Beaufort the boat was lazily edging her way through an almost perfectly smooth sea, with just a sufficient suggestion of breeze to give her steerage way. Tom was at the tiller, with next to nothing to do there. Larry and Dick were dozing in the shadow of the mainsail, while Cal, after his custom, was watching the porpoises at play and the gulls circling about overhead and everything else that could be watched whether there was any apparent reason for watching it or not.
Presently he turned to Tom and, indicating his meaning by an inclination of the head toward a peninsula five or six miles away, which had just come into view as the boat cleared a marsh island, said:
“That’s it.”
“What’s it? and what is it?” asked Tom, too indolent now to disentangle his sentences.
“Quasi,” said Cal.