“I’m coming after you in the ‘dink,’” Tom answered.
“Well, my land! If I ever see sech a top-heavy, lopsided thing,” murmured Aunty Welcome. “Is you all going to trust your precious lives out in mid ocean in sech a contrivance?”
“Don’t you fret one bit, not when we’re with Captain Carey,” Polly laughed as she waved her hand. The last girl stepped aboard, and the sails were hoisted. After the little spreads of canvas on their own boats, it seemed to the girls as if the sails of the Lucy C. were gigantic, but Tom and his father managed them trimly, and as the wind filled them, they struck out across the bay with a tilt to leeward that was delightful.
“Captain, do I walk with the right sort of roll?” asked Ted, her hands deep in her reefer pockets, her cap on the back of her red curls, as she stepped boldly out on the slanting deck. But the sloop dipped to a wave, and came up with a lurch, and Ted sat down with startling suddenness.
“Well, not quite,” the Captain answered from the wheel, his blue eyes twinkling. “You’d better get acquainted with her first. Now, you can’t get up and do a grand march along the deck of a driving sloop. It’s against all human nature and boat nature. You’ve got to sit tight, and mind the sloop, and follow her moods, and get ahead of them too. A sloop has got more moods than any boat I know of. A yawl is sort of divided in her ways, like a widow after her second husband. She’s got one before, and one behind, so to speak, and it steadies her a bit, but a sloop’s sails act in close sympathy, and when one of them starts acting kittenish, the rest follow suit.”
“How large is this one, Captain?” asked Ruth, holding to her cap, as the wind blew freshly around her.
“About forty foot, more or less. Her draught’s seven foot.”
“Why here we are to the channel already,” Polly sang out, as they slipped past Smugglers’ Cove, and could see the view out to sea around the Point. The doctor was sitting down on the landing fishing; fishing tranquilly, in his own way. There were lines hanging all around him, fastened to the planks with an invention of his own, by which a little bell rang every time a fish took the bait. Placidly he sat there, his hat tilted forward to shield his eyes, and a pile of magazines beside him betraying his real occupation. The girls called and called to him; at last he looked up and waved to them.
As they rounded the Point the wind freshened considerably. It was glorious to sail with the sharp bow cutting the water like a knife, and throwing up great clouds of spray that drenched the girls like an April shower as the head wind threw it back on them. Overhead the canvas tugged until the rigging sang a tune all its own.
Ted and Sue were singing at the tops of their voices, arms linked closely, backed up against what Crullers called “the high side of her.” The others joined in the choruses, except Polly, who stood beside the Captain at the wheel. There was a look in her dark eyes that matched his own, as she half closed them in the face of the wind, a look out at the open sea they both loved well. Once the Captain turned his head, and smiled down at her, as if to let her know he understood her feelings exactly, and he let her help with the jib several times, while he and Tom managed the main sail, and Nancy held her steady on her course at the little pilot wheel.