After dinner the Vaughan girls had to return, but the others dressed and sat out on the steps, awaiting the Captain’s coming. The everyday suits of blue duck had been discarded, and they had dressed in festal array to honor the Captain. They were all in their best yachting suits of white duck, trimmed in dark blue, with dark blue reefer jackets, and caps to match. But before the trip was over, when the seas had swashed up merrily over the sloop, as she keeled over to the lee-shore, they wished they had worn the blue duck.
“What boat will he bring that can carry all of us?” asked Sue.
“Tom said the sloop,” answered Polly, as she sat up on the railing, and re-tied Crullers’ hair bows into a semblance of neatness and taste. “It belongs to the lighthouse keeper at the Point, but the Captain can borrow it whenever he wants, and it’s a sea-going craft.”
“Is it, indeed?” giggled Sue. “Girls, do you notice how Commodore Polly tosses around nautical phrases real careless-like nowadays?”
There hove into sight around the Knob, just then, the Captain and his sloop. Nancy and Tom were aboard too, and acting as able seamen.
“Polly, I’ll get your soap and potatoes and mail to-night,” shouted Tom, as they came within hail. “I saw Billy Clewen over at the Inlet with his tender, and I hopped in so as to meet father at the Point, and come on down.”
“That’s all right,” Polly responded. “Oh, girls, isn’t she handsome,” as they watched the sloop under the Captain’s handling. Steadily, easily, without any apparent fuss or bother, he brought her about, reefed her sails, and left her standing, as Tom said, quiet as a lamb, without a halter on.
“Who puts a halter on a lamb anyway, Tom?” teased Nancy. “Besides, the Lucy C. has a halter on. Didn’t you see me just drop it overboard? We can’t bring her up to the landing, Polly. She draws nine feet—”
“Seven,” corrected the Captain, as he smoked comfortably on his pet pipe, an old briarwood whose bowl was all charred from long usage. “And ten-foot beam.”
“How can we get aboard, then?” asked Polly.