"You beat us handsomely and Wyndham deserves the cup for his pluck in carrying on when we were forced to lower our topsail," Elliot admitted. "Still something was due to luck; you got the last of the stream along the shore when the tide running down the river carried the rest of us back."
"Wyndham has a talent for that kind of thing," said Marston. "Sometimes you feel he, so to speak, thinks like a fish. He doesn't need to calculate when the tide will turn and where he'll find slack water. He knows."
"Wyndham has a talent for getting what he wants," Chisholm interposed. "Deva ought to have beaten Red Rose."
"Aren't you rather young to judge?" Marston asked, with a touch of dryness.
"Oh, well," said the lad, "I like a man who loses now and then. You can understand that kind of fellow."
Elliot frowned. He could take a beating; but he was curious and looked at Marston thoughtfully.
"I suppose you didn't see the Knoll buoy?"
"We did not," Marston replied. "There was something on the water in the haze, but it was too small for the buoy. Wyndham thought it a gull, a big black-back; his sight is pretty good."
"How did the thing bear?"
Marston hesitated, because he saw where the question led, but he was honest.