Shorty looked to see better. "If it's a watermelon, I give up—she's gone," said Shorty. "They's nobody heaves a watermelon overboard to lighten a vessel."
It was a watermelon; and we all gave up. Everybody knew that the Henriette's cook was a great fellow to ship a watermelon and keep it down among the ice for the passage home. As Shorty said, there was no reason ever for a watermelon being hove overboard. And it couldn't have floated out of her hold unless the vessel had broken up. The mast, the gasolene-barrel, the dory, the hatch-cover, and now the melon.
Shorty made a flying leap into the yellow dory towing astern, and, leaning far enough out to lay the dory over on her side, he spread wide his arms and the melon floated right in over the gunnel and into his arms, and he took it to his bosom.
Big Bill hurried to take the melon when Shorty passed it up over the rail. "Poor little Henriette an' the good fellers in yer—where are yer now, I wonder?" said Bill, looking down on the melon. And then he tested it for soundness. "Only one soft spot where she bumped into somethin'," announced Bill. He called for a knife and cut it up, and tasted a piece.
"Not a touch o' salt," he said, and passed slices of it around.
A good-tasting melon, everybody said; and eating it on the Esther's quarter we said all the good things we knew of the Henriette and her skipper and crew.
Two days later the Esther put into Newport. We came past Point Judith in a night of black vapor—a bad night for Big Bill. He saw steamer lights all sides of him, and never went to sleep at all.
We stood up Narragansett Bay in the dawn, and the cook of the Esther, smoking his pipe on the deck, was the boy could tell all about the big summer houses on the bluffs. There is that about cooks—they always seem to hold more gossip than anybody else aboard a vessel. Names of who owned the cottages, how many millions—and how they made the millions—was what the cook could tell us, with a few bits of flaming gossip added on.
Some big schooner-yachts from New York were anchored in Newport Harbor. One of them, as large again as any fresh halibutter that ever was launched—a great black-enamelled cruising schooner with a high free-board, perhaps fifteen times the tonnage of the Henriette—held the eyes of all. "If we'd only had her out there the other day!" was what most of us were thinking.
"She'd be the girl to walk us out o' shoal water in that breeze!" put in Shorty. "We'd had her 'nd we'd 'a' washed her face for her!"