“Now, lads,” he said, “give her all you’ve got. Heave!”
There was a back-breaking moment of straining, cracking muscles.
And then something happened. The Sea-Lark reluctantly began to move.
Click-click-clickety-click, went the winch.
“Easy, now,” ordered Tony. “Rest a few minutes. She’ll come all right, and we have plenty of time.”
From that moment the launching of the sloop, though slow, was a certainty. A dozen times Tony had to make the trip across the river to adjust the planks and rollers beneath the boat’s keel, but she came up the slope without mishap.
“My word, she looks big!” Jack exclaimed when he had climbed to the top and was lumbering along on her side, down to the water’s edge.
“What did you take her for?—a canoe?” Tony laughed. “She won’t look as big, though, when she gets into the water. Still, a thirty-foot sloop is all you two will want to handle in a breeze.”
When their prize was within a foot of the water, Tony went over her with a calking-iron and mallet, plugging up the worst of the leaky places with oakum so that she could safely be taken up the river as far as the boat-yard without danger of sinking on the way. Jack watched this performance with a critical eye.