The boys laughed as they gazed after him, and Barton said:
"Filibustering must keep your hair standing on end, eh, Dan? I reckon it beats wrecking, though you couldn't get an old Key Wester to admit it. There hasn't been a wreck on the Reef for goodness knows how long. Father promised to take me with him on the next wrecking job if it isn't blowing too hard when the schooners go out to the Reef."
"Well, you can count on seeing Captain Jim Wetherly and the Resolute on the job no matter how hard she blows," smiled Dan with a spark of the rivalry which flamed high between the tow-boat and the schooner fleet. Willing hands made short work of Dan's tasks, and he hurried into his shore-going clothes while Barton swung his legs from the bunk and retailed the latest news about ships, and the sponge market, and the High School base-ball team which had won a match from the soldiers of the garrison. They parted a little later, Dan eager to run home and see his mother, and Barton anxious to make the Sombrero ready for a trial spin.
As Dan sped toward the cottage on the other side of the narrow island, he said to himself with a puzzled frown:
"Everything Bart talked about made me think of the other night in Pensacola: his father's going away, and the next wreck on the Reef, and all that. And he thinks his father is the strongest, bravest man that ever went to sea. Maybe he is, but I wish he wasn't related to Bart."
A slender, sweet-faced woman in black was waiting in a dooryard shaded by tropical verdure as Dan rounded the corner. She had heard the far-echoing, resonant whistle of the Resolute, and knew that her boy was home again. Her husband, for many years employed in the Key West Custom House, had died only two years before, and the love and yearning in her eyes at sight of Dan would have told you that he was her only child and her all-in-all if you had never seen them together before. He was taller than she, and, as her sturdy son stooped to kiss her with his arms about her neck, she said:
"I wanted to be at the wharf to meet you, Danny boy, but I couldn't leave home in time. Bart Pringle's mother ran in to talk to me about sending him away to school. I told her I wanted to do as much for you, but the way wasn't open yet. They can afford it, and Bart is too bright and ambitious to settle down in a Key West rut."
They walked to the wide veranda across which the cool trade-wind swept, and Mrs. Frazier ordered Dan to take the biggest, easiest wicker chair, after which she vanished indoors and almost instantly reappeared with a plate laden with pie and doughnuts.
"You had breakfast in that stuffy little galley, I suppose," laughed she, "but I know you are always hungry. You can stow these trifles away as a deck-load, can't you?"