“How are you going to work it?” Leon asked briefly.
“Why! there’s a vessel ’most built on the stocks right ’longside the finished hull. Us boys are going to wake very early, trot down to the shipyard before any of the workmen are around; then we’ll shin up the staging an’ over the half-built vessel right onto the white deck o’ the new one that’s waiting to be launched. ’Twill be easy to drop below into the cabin an’ hide under the bunks until the time comes for launching her. When we hear ’em knocking out the last block from under her keel—when she’s just beginning to crawl—then we’ll pop up an’ be on deck when she’s launched; see?”
“Ho! So you’re going to do the stowaway act, eh?” Starrie Chase, with that characteristic snap of his brown eyes, seemed to be taking a mental photograph of the plan.
“Only for an hour or two. You want to be in this too; don’t you, Starrie?”
Leon was silent, considering. The underhand scheme ran counter to the aboveboard principles of the scout law which he had sworn to obey; of that he felt sure. “On my honor I will do my best ... to keep myself morally straight!” Voluntarily and enthusiastically he had taken the chivalrous oath, and he was “too much of a fellow” to go back on it deliberately.
“No! I don’t want to play stowaway,” he answered after a minute. “It’s a crazy plan anyhow! Give it up, Gode! Likely enough you’ll scratch up the paint of the new cabin with your boots, skulking there all three of you—then there’ll be a big row; and ’twould seem a pity, too, after all the months it has taken to build an’ paint that dandy new hull.”
Such a view would scarcely have presented itself to Leon two months ago; he certainly was “deepening the water” in which he floated.
“Well, let’s pop down to the shipyard anyhow, an’ see her!” urged Godey, hoping that a contemplation of the new vessel, airily wedged high on the launching ways, with her bridal deck white as a hound’s tooth, would weaken the other’s resolution.