“So do I,” said Sue. “I shall enjoy drinking the Patsy D.’s health in it with Aunty Welcome’s fruit lemonade after the race is won.”
“Listen to her, Polly. As if her old Patsy had any chance at all against my Hurricane.”
Sue smiled, and slipped her arm through Ted’s.
“Bide a wee, Edwina,” she laughed. “I’ll let you drink out of it first of all.”
The day before the regatta was an exciting one on Eagle Bay. Sometime the night before the Adventure dropped anchor, and the first object the girls beheld the following morning was the slender, low yacht, with her great uplift of spars and white-clad sailors running about the deck.
“She’s won ever so many cups,” Dorothy said, as they watched her through opera glasses, which Polly had thought to slip in with her equipment. “They stand all in a long row on her cabin sideboard. And she’s worth over fifty thousand dollars. When I told papa I thought that was too much to pay for a yacht, he laughed at me and said some steam yachts cost as much as that just to keep traveling for a year.”
“There comes another one around the Point,” called Ted. “That’s a yawl, isn’t it?”
“Auxiliary yawl,” corrected Dorothy. “How queer her sails look from here, the big mainsail, and topsail, and the jib, and then that funny spread down near the end. Makes me think of a cat and her kitten. But wait till the sloops arrive. I like them the best. They are so stately and slender, and when they sail under full canvas they dip to the wind like gulls.”
Polly had hesitated over putting fresh coats of paint on the Tidy Jane, and the Iris. The other boats were in fairly good order, for Tom and his father had repainted them early in the spring for the Holmes boys. But that final week before the event, Polly painted and caulked seams, and overhauled with an energy and vim that made even Tom remonstrate.
“Now you mind what I tell you, it won’t make them go a bit faster, not a bit,” he grumbled, when Polly coaxed him to help them fix a dry dock.