For all his sailing, the captain was a true landsman, and when under pressure his thin nautical veneer slipped off him, and his language was not of the sea.
"Come away, Sandy," he called artlessly, "and gee her a bit. Gee!"
"I can have the law on you for obstructing the King's Highway!" thundered the man on the bridge.
"The water will be jist as much the King's Highway as the road!" retorted the captain indignantly. "If you would be leafing other folks' business alone, and attending to your own, you would be knowing the law better. It is a rule of the sea that effery vessel—"
"The sea!" the enemy burst in with an overwhelming roar. "The sea! A vessel! A miserable fish pond, and an old tub like that, the sea and a vessel! Get away with you! Get out of my sight!"
He waved a hand as if he would wipe the Inverness from off the face of the waters.
During the altercation, Roderick McRae had been leaning far over the railing, striving to attract the attention of the madman in the buggy. But his voice was drowned in the laughter and cheers of the passengers who were enjoying the battle immensely. At this moment he put his fingers to his teeth and uttered a long, sharp whistle. "Ho! Lawyer Ed!" he shouted. The man on the bridge started. His angry face, with the quickness of lightning, broke into radiance.
"Roderick!—Rod! Are you there? Hooray!" He caught off his hat and waved it in the air. "Come on home with me! I dare you to jump it!"
The Inverness was at a perilous distance from the bridge, but the young man did not hesitate a moment before the half-laughing challenge. He leaped lightly upon the railing, poised a moment and, with a mighty spring, landed upon the bridge. The onlookers gave a gasp and then a relieved and admiring cheer.
Another spring put Roderick into the buggy, where his friend hammered him on the back, and they laughed like a couple of school-boys. And that was what they really were, for though Roderick McRae was nearly twenty-four, he was feeling like a boy in his home-coming joy, and as for Lawyer Ed he hadn't grown an hour older, either in feeling or appearance, but lived perennially somewhere near the joyous age of eighteen.