Polly enjoyed the plan, and they hurried with their dressing, then walked out sedately into the little room that served as a dining-room. Welcome’s face was immobile and unrelenting, but on the table there were neither boiled eggs nor oatmeal. Crullers saw, and gave one glad cry.
“Girls, waffles!”
Now waffles are usually merely an adjunct to a full meal, but not Welcome’s waffles. There was no room for other food. The girls ate waffles with butter and sugar on them, and then waffles with honey on them, then Polly tried some maple syrup, and Sue hunted up the strawberry jam jar, and Ruth appeared with some marmalade.
“’Deed, an’ I nevah see sech appetites,” Welcome declared, her indignation forgotten, as she stood over the cookstove, and guarded the waffle iron, her old face smiling broadly. “Dat’s jest sixty-nine I done cooked dis yere morning for you all, and I don’t see whar you puts ’em, chillern.”
“It’s your own fault, Aunty,” Polly declared. “You make them so light and nice, that when we eat them, they just evaporate.”
“Listen to her get ’round her mammy,” Welcome’s fat sides shook with laughter, as she ladled out more. “Hyar goes seventy-one.”
Tom had agreed to drive over after them in the carry-all. Polly’s orders had gone forth, and not a single boat was to be taken out on the bay until the Junior race. She wanted them spick and span for the event of the regatta, and even Dorothy and Bess’s boat, the Nixie, looked weather-beaten beside the newly painted challengers of the Junior Cup.
“Who are the judges, Kate?” asked Ted, as they drove along the shore road towards town. It had been a matter for calculation to get seven girls into the carry-all besides the driver, but some way it had happened. There was room for four people, and under pressure, five, but when they picked up Nancy too, down at Fair Havens, there were nine aboard, and the colts moderated their pace. Tom’s special pride in life, next to his hope of being a life saver, was the colts. Sorrels they were, and almost a perfect match to Ted’s red curls. The Captain had owned them twelve years, and they had grown up with the children, so they still called them the “colts.” And they had traveled that shore road so often during those twelve years that the Captain declared he shouldn’t be at all surprised to see them walk out of their stalls, harness each other up, and start off alone at any time. As the two trotted along the shore road together, they scattered a cloud of dust behind, and their short manes caught the breeze like a t’gallant peak flag, Tom said.
It was the first time the girls had all been to Eastport since their arrival at Eagle Bay. It lay about two miles from the club house on Orienta Point, and a quarter of a mile up the Inlet. A big lumber mill off to one end of town hummed its song lazily. You could tell just what the saw was doing from the tone, Sue said. First the sharp hiss as it cut the bark, then a gradually rising buzz and hum, till there came the crack as it fell apart. Off to the other side of the village lay the railroad station. There were half a dozen buildings around the central square of green, some low white houses, with their green blinds tightly closed, and little garden patches out in front filled with sweet-scented old-fashioned flowers.
“I was born over yonder,” Tom told them, pointing his whip at a little house next the white church that occupied the north end of the green. “So was Pa, and his Pa too, but now my Aunt Cynthy Bardwell lives there. She’s got the finest rose garden in Eastport, and all the summer folks come down here to buy her roses. She’s Pa’s only sister, and her husband was a captain too, sailed a schooner up to the Gulf every year for over forty years, and fell off the dock down here one day loading ties.”