“I am.” Polly smiled at the big white club house across the bay quite as if she expected it to nod back at her. “The Tidy Jane is just as fine a catboat as there is on the bay, and so are all our boats. Nancy’s going to race the Pirate, Tom’s knockabout, and the other afternoon when we sailed to the inlet and back, I had the best of her all the way. Of course I shall race.”
“Is there a prize?” asked Crullers, the practical. The girls all broke into a peal of laughter, and Ruth declared that Crullers never could see anything in empty glory. There had to be a tangible goal for her to exert herself.
“There’s a silver cup for the big boats to race for,” Polly replied. “Commodore Vaughan’s sloop, Adventure, has held it for sixty-footers for three years, they say. And there’s a smaller cup for twenty-footers and under. We’d come under that head.”
“What will you use it for, Polly, after you win it?” asked Sue, innocently, and Polly promptly threw sand at her, till she cried quarter.
“Whether I win it or not, it’s the sport of the thing that counts,” she said. “I never saw a race in all my life that I didn’t wish I was in it, just for the chance of winning. It isn’t the prize so much, it’s the honor of the thing, and the sport.”
“I know, Polly, that’s perfectly right,” rejoined Kate, approvingly. “What if no one ever entered a race for fear they might not win; there’d be no racing at all.”
“Well, if you intend entering, I shall too,” said Sue. “For I know that the Patsy D. can outsail anything on this bay if she once ‘gets a’going,’ as the Captain says. The trouble is, she won’t ‘get a’going’ until she has a mind to. I can’t seem to make her grab hold of a breeze and pull.”
“You don’t let go your main sheet right,” Polly told her. “You hoist your sail, and let it wobble before you let the boom swing about, and catch the wind into the sail right. Makes me think of a story the Captain told about one of the summer cottagers last year, who went out with Tom and him one day. There was a big sea on, and when a puff of wind caught her, the Captain called out, ‘Let go that jib, let go that jib’. And the guest was really angry and indignant. ‘Who’s touching your old jib, I should like to know,’ he said, huffily. The Captain just shook when he told it.”
Ruth sat up suddenly, and put back her hair from her face.
“I just saw a boat put off from the Orienta dock,” she said. “It looks like the Nixie. Bess is at the tiller. I wonder what they can want. They’re making for here.”