"Hello, Bart. Come aboard and help me scrub decks and get things ship-shape and I'll be ready to jump ashore just so much sooner."
Barton made a flying leap aboard as soon as the lines were made fast, and asked as he picked up a pail and broom:
"What kind of a voyage did you have, Dan? Anything exciting happen?"
"Nothing to speak of," replied Dan, and he felt his face redden with a guilty sense of secrecy. He was about to say that he had met Barton's father in Pensacola, without mentioning how or where, when the other lad spoke up:
"I tried to get away for a little trip myself. Father went up the Gulf on the mail steamer and I begged him to take me along. But he was going only to Tampa to see about buying a couple of sponging schooners, and he said he was in too much of a hurry to bother with me."
"Going only to Tampa," echoed Dan with a foolish smile. "Oh, yes, only as far as Tampa. Sorry you had to miss it, Bart. How's everything with you? Have you bent the new main-sail on the Sombrero?"
Barton plunged into an excited discussion about the fast little sloop which the boys owned in partnership, while Dan tried to keep his wits about him, for he was thrown into fresh doubt and uneasiness by the news that Jeremiah Pringle had said he was going to Tampa instead of Pensacola. Usually the two boys had so many important matters to talk about that one could find a chance to break in only when the other paused for lack of breath, but now Dan found it hard to avoid awkward silences on his part. He was glad when old Bill McKnight, the chief engineer of the Resolute, waddled up to them and announced with a sweeping gesture toward the city streets:
"Back again to the palm trees and the brave Cubanos and the excitements of a metropolis smeared over a chunk of coral reef so blamed small that I'm scared to be out after dark without a lantern for fear I'll walk overboard. I'm due to start a revolution in Honduras, and to-day I enlist a few hundred brave and desperate Key West cigar-makers, Dan. I'm perishin' for a little war and tumult. Look out for my signal rockets."
With that Mr. McKnight jauntily twirled his grizzled moustache and ambled up the wharf. He had been engineer of the Resolute when she was running the Spanish blockade of Cuba, as a filibuster to carry arms and ammunitions to the revolutionists, and his cool-headed courage had fetched the tug out of some perilous places. The ponderous, good-natured engineer was very fond of Dan and every little while invited him, with all seriousness, to join some new and absurd scheme for touching off a Spanish-American revolution, with dazzling promises of loot and glory.