“See his black nose an’ short fore-flippers!” whispered Leon. “Don’t his eyes stick out? They’re a kind o’ blue-black an’ glazy. There! he’s noticing us now. He’s trying to flounder off—with that funny, teetering kind o’ wabble they have! Say! hadn’t we better row back to Captain Andy, and leave him to recover? He’s all used up; that big one gave him an awful licking.”
And this merciful consideration from Starrie Chase, who, prior to his scout days, would have had no thought save how to finish the cruel work of the big bully and put an end to the beaten rival!
“Well! you did see a harbor seal, Nix, ’most near enough to shake his flipper, eh?” challenged Captain Andy as the three scrambled back aboard the motor-boat, and made the little Pill fast astern by its short towrope, while the Aviator bore out of the blue creek, to head upstream toward the town again.
“Yes! I’d have tried to do it too, if he hadn’t been so completely ‘all in,’” laughed the scout. “I suppose we’ll have plenty of opportunities to see seals and listen to their barking when we camp out on the white dunes during the last days of August and the beginning of September. They say the young ones make a kind of cooing noise, much like a turtle-dove, only stronger; I’m bent on capturing a pup-seal, to tame him!”
“Oh! you’d have no trouble about the taming, only you couldn’t feed him! But you’ll see seals a-plenty an’ hear ’em, too, next summer. They just love to lie out on a reef o’ rocks in the sun, when the tide’s low, especially if the wind’s a little from the no’thwest,” said the ex-skipper. “A lonely reef, a warm sun, and light no’thwesterly breeze make up the harbor-seal’s heaven, I guess!”
CHAPTER XV
THE CAMP ON THE DUNES
And when those fervently anticipated last days of August did in due time dawn, they brought with them many opportunities to Nixon and his brother scouts of watching Spotty Seal and his kindred in the enjoyment of their mundane paradise, whose pavement of gold was a wave-washed reef and its harpings the mild bluster of a northwesterly breeze.