Suddenly Mabel waked to find herself gouging into the bunk with her fingernails in much the attitude of some one climbing a steep clay bank, and her legs entirely out of the bunk. Ellen had slipped down on top of her and would surely have been on the floor had not Mabel’s bulk stopped her.
“Daddy,” Mabel called in the purely conversational tone in which one might say, “Will you have cream or lemon?” “Is this boat right?”
“Why, of course it is. It is the rightest little boat in the Eastern Yacht Club.” Even when half asleep Mr. Wing was the proud possessor of “the best little schooner that ever set sail.”
“Wake up quick and see!” commanded Mabel. “Something is the matter with the boat or my bed is broken and you have to do something in either case.”
By this time, everybody aft was more or less awake.
“Did you ever hear such fascinating sounds as the steward is making? I would adore to arrange the orchestration for them and call it ‘Nocturnal Arabesques’ or something,” Jane said to Frances. “But isn’t it funny, I am sleeping on the side of the ship instead of in my bunk and the rail around my little bunk is like a ceiling over my head and my bunk is like a wall! What do you suppose is the matter?”
“I’m just the same way,” giggled Frances. “And I know we ought to feel excited and be running around with streaming fists and clenched hair and we just lie here upside down and giggle and talk nonsense. We have probably hit a rock or something and we will all be drowned like rats.”
Mr. Wing crawled in their cabin with much the same method a fly walks along the ceiling. He came in just in time to hear the end of Frances’ speech. “You don’t seem to be making much effort to save yourself,” he laughed. “But I’ll save you the anxiety you don’t seem to feel and tell you that nothing serious is the matter. We just anchored in too shallow water. While the tide was in, it was all right, but the tide is out now and we are turning turtle and are lying in the mud on our beam ends. There is no danger; it just means that we will be a bit upset till the tide comes in. Then we will beat it over to Provincetown.”
“You girls put on kimonos and come into the saloon. I stuck my head down the galley hatch and found Breck prying the steward out from behind the stove where he slipped when we did our flip. I told him to make some coffee and it will be here in a minute,” Jack announced thrusting a wet and tousled head into the cabin.
“When I was a kid, I used to wonder how the heathen Chinee could walk upside down on the other side of the world, but I see now that it was quite simple compared to this,” Charlie said as he landed the girls on the least perilous of the transoms.