Swinging leisurely along the beach was a tall, long-legged, stoop-shouldered boy of fifteen years or so. He wore overalls, turned up around his bare legs, and a huge straw hat hid his face in shadow. Sue declared that he resembled the crane they had seen away back in the wild rice-fields along the Potomac. But he was a friendly-looking native, at all events, and he carried a pail of freshly-dug clams, and over one shoulder a hoe with a broken handle.
“Don’t scare him, girls,” cautioned Polly; but she had scarcely spoken before the boy waved the hoe at them in a neighborly salute, and sent out a hail.
“Hello!”
“Hello!” shouted back Polly and Sue, but the more sedate members of the club waited until he caught up with them before delivering any greeting.
“I saw you come ashore this morning,” he said, smiling at them frankly. “I was out with father taking in the lights, and we saw somebody wave at us from the yacht—”
“I did,” smiled Polly.
“Did you? I waved back. And father said he guessed you must be the folks we was looking for, so I’d better stop over at the hotel this morning on my way back, but I went clamming first. Got some whoppers too, regular quahaugs.”
He held out the pail for their admiration, and the girls duly admired, but it was not with the thought for those particular clams. As Kate said afterwards: “I thought right away that if he could get them, so could we, and what dandy clam frys we’d have in the dear old chafing-dish.”
Polly looked at him steadily for a minute more before she hazarded a guess.
“Is your father the captain?”