“Captain,” answered Dan sweetly and earnestly, “we’ve been simply devastated with grief since we left you. Your gentle words and kindly deeds won our hearts, and we just couldn’t go on without one more sight of your dear face.” (“Keep her off with the boat hook,” he muttered aside to Bob.) “And—yes, you have,” cried Dan joyfully, “you’ve brought your dear face with you, haven’t you? I was afraid you’d change it!”
The captain and the crew of the tug were smiling broadly, but the object of Dan’s raillery went purple in his “dear face,” and his hands clenched and unclenched at his sides. (“For all the world,” as Tom said afterward, “as though he was going to bu-bu-bust up!”)
“You young whelp!” he roared.
A bell rang in the engine room and the tug—the Scout, as the gilt letters over the wheelhouse announced—trembled as the propeller was reversed. Up came the bow with its big rope fender, and Bob, boat hook in hand, stood ready. As the tug slid alongside Bob reached out with the hook, and the tug, instead of nestling up to the launch, sheered off.
“Here! What are you doing that for?” yelled Captain Sauder.
“Saving our paint,” answered Bob calmly. There was five feet of water between the two boats.
“Bring your boat hook here!” called the tugboat captain to one of the hands. “You boys might as well give in,” he added, not unkindly. “You’re beat, I guess. Where’s Captain Sauder’s boy?”
“Didn’t you meet him?” asked Dan, in surprise. (“Don’t let that fellow get his hook on to us, Bob!”) “Why, he started to walk back half an hour ago; said he couldn’t stay away from the captain there any longer. Sure you didn’t pass him?”
The tugboat captain chuckled. But Captain Sauder, muttering inarticulate things, seized the boat hook from the deck hand and sprang toward the stern, which was now opposite the cockpit of the launch. There was an eight-foot haft on the hook he held, and he would have experienced no difficulty in reaching the launch had not Bob interfered. But every time the captain tried to get his hook fixed around one of the awning posts or over the edge of the coaming, Bob politely but firmly knocked it away. The captain’s remarks were unfit for publication, and even Barry looked pained. After a moment of this duel the tugboat captain came to the rescue.
“Back her and bring her alongside,” he called to the man at the wheel. The bell rang and the Scout slid back a few yards. The bell rang again, the man at the wheel twirled the spokes around, and the blunt nose of the tug poked its way toward the launch’s quarter. On the bow stood the captain of the Henry Nellis, ready to leap aboard the Vagabond as soon as the boats touched.