This part of the craft was found to be fitted up with much luxury. Besides berths in the cabin proper, there were a stateroom and bath-room.
“I’ll leave you in possession, Captain,” announced Mr. Macklin. “You will find everything ready for starting at a moment’s notice.”
“We won’t start until I’ve had a little time to study the motor of this new craft,” declared Joe. “I’m not going to be caught with a motor on a boat under way until I understand something about that motor.”
In two or three minutes more he had the engine running.
“It’s a smooth mote, all right,” Dawson declared, after a few minutes more of observation. “I guess you can cast off, Captain, whenever you feel like moving us out of here.”
So the “Soudan” moved out into the stream. The craft behaved beautifully as the young skipper turned her nose toward the Battery.
“How do you like this boat, Mr. Moddridge?” asked the young skipper, as the nervous one sauntered by on the bridge deck.
“Oh, as well as any other craft,” replied Eben Moddridge. “She’s a handsome and comfortable vessel, but I’ve had so many horrors on the salt water lately that, if I get out of Wall Street with my fortune, as I now have some hopes of doing, I think it will be the mountains or the Middle West for me. Anything to be away from the salt water for a good, long while.”
As Moddridge turned away Captain Tom could not help sending after him a look of sympathy. Anyone who could not love the sea and the smell of salt water was much to be pitied!
The short spin up the Hudson River, over the same route taken three hundred years before by Hendrik Hudson—though our friends did not at this time go as far up the river—proved the excellence of the “Soudan” as a well-behaved craft. Then the young skipper turned back for Pier eight.