“How, how, how!” echoed from the circle around the table.
That night when dinner had been cleared away, the family grouped itself in front of the drift-wood fire and prepared to hear the tale of the cruise. The storm was howling and raging without but the great tongues of purple and green flame that shot up the chimney from the drift wood suffused a cheery feeling to the Islanders.
“We had a cinch getting up to Castine, with a flood-tide and that nice southerly,” began Fred; “it didn’t flush out until we got inside the harbour.”
“You know that little Nautilus Island, mother?” asked Billy. “Well, we ran in back of that and over to a fine little cove. We took out the fishing lines and in fifteen minutes we had a mess of tom-cod.”
“Say, maybe tom-cod and bacon isn’t the food for the gods! eh what, Bill!” remarked Fred, smacking his lips at the memory of his savoury feast.
“You bet! We landed after catching enough fish and made a good fire to broil them. Then we ate lunch. We wound up on that cake Mose sneaked into our hamper last night.”
Paul and Dudley exchanged looks that said as plainly as words, “Now we know why Billy preferred prunes!”
“You know, mother, we always wanted to explore the Bagaduce River; well, this was a swell chance with the tide still running up, so we up-anchored and started off. We’d have been home long before the storm came if we hadn’t gone so far up the river. But it was worth the trouble, wasn’t it, Bill?”
“Yeh! There’s the place where old Baron Castine and the Tarratine Indians camped when Maine was first settled,” added Billy.
“Then when the wind changed this afternoon, we were up that river eating the last crumbs of cake. It began to look a little squally so we considered we’d better make tracks for home. And we sure did make a track—all froth and foam. It didn’t get to be a real storm you know, until about five o’clock, so that’s why we hadn’t reefed the sail,” explained Fred.