The captain grabbed an oyster truck and hurried to his storeroom to get it. A moment later he returned, trundling the anchor and an old hawser before him. Alec helped lift them aboard. Then, while the captain was bending on the hawser, Alec busied himself in the cabin, putting the things there in some sort of order.
Presently came a load of provisions. Alec carried to the storeroom bag after bag. It seemed to him he had brought enough stuff aboard to feed a ship's crew for a year. The provisions he stowed away in the cupboards in the cabin. When Alec was done, the captain joined him and inspected the cupboards.
"Looks to me as though we're ready to cast off the minute we get our crew aboard," he said. "She seems fit to contend with almost anything—especially hunger."
"I can't think of another thing we could wish for," said Alec.
"Unless it was some music," said the captain wistfully. "It never seemed right to me to go on a party like this without some music. I'd have given a lot if Elsa had learned to play the piano, but she just wouldn't. Hasn't a particle of love for music. Funny, isn't it, when I like it so much. She likes to dance, too. You'd think she'd have some liking for music, wouldn't you?"
Alec made no response. But when the shipper drove away in his car, Alec ran to the Osprey and quickly uncoupled his wireless outfit. "It won't be much," he said, "but it's all I can do for the captain. He can have music at night now, anyway. I'll try to surprise him."
He fastened his instruments in the cabin of the Rebecca, very much as he had had them in the Bertha B. With two sticks he made an aerial which he placed flat on the roof of the cabin. The sticks were fastened together like a Maltese cross, and around their ends Alec wrapped strand after strand of wire, bringing the end into the cabin through the tiny window just above his instruments. He made a ground by twisting his wire to a little length of chain, which he fastened over the side so that its end hung in the water. Then he tested his instruments and found they were in order. As far as Alec could see, everything was now in readiness for the cruise.
Doubly delightful to Alec was the little trip that began next morning because of the weeks of hard labor that had preceded it. Just as his work had palled on him because he had been unable to combine any amusement with it, so amusements pall when they are not interspersed with toil. Now Alec's appetite for pleasure was more than whetted. He was ravenous for enjoyment. And being so, he enjoyed everything. The sun that shone so bright seemed merry rather than hot to Alec. The winds that circled about the mastheads seemed to Alec as playful as squirrels frisking in a tree top. The waves seemed to laugh in glee as the wind drove them before it, showing their white teeth in gleaming smiles as they flashed in the sun. White teeth they were, too, that could rend as well as gleam in the sun. Well enough Alec knew that fact. Before many days he was to know it better still. But now he had no thought of care. He had put work aside. He was like a small boy on a lark. Usually rather staid and sober, now he kept the party laughing at his antics. And they were ready enough to laugh with him. For this was a real pleasure party. For the time being, care had been thrown to the winds.
But if the mere joy of being alive and free and with friends could make Alec happy, the fact that he was seeing new things and learning new things gave him added enjoyment. For never, for a single instant, did Alec forget to pick up bits of knowledge that came his way. For well nigh a year, now, he had lived on the waves. He had sailed the Delaware in sunshine and in storm, when the weather was blazing hot and when ice formed on the deck. And yet his knowledge of this great body of water was limited wholly to what he had seen in the narrow compass of the oyster-beds, or to what he had read. Now he was to see with his own eyes the wonders of the deep. For as yet Alec had hardly been out of sight of land, and he had never seen the ocean.
Alec would not have been himself had he not remembered to bring along a map. And it was the largest map of the Bay he could lay his hands on. He saw at a glance that in contour the Bay was roughly pear-shaped. On either shore little excrescences, like the warts and blemishes that come on real pears, stuck out here and there, to mar the perfect pear-shaped outline of the Bay. The largest of these was Egg Island Point, off which lay the light he knew so well. Miles farther up the coast the Rebecca passed Ben Davis Point. And still farther along stretched a wide cove, with the Cohansey River pouring into it, and a little, squat lighthouse standing on a point, to guide the mariner into the stream.