CHAPTER IV
FRIENDS AFLOAT
Toby saw no more of Arnold for a week, for school kept him busy, but Mr. Tucker reported that the Frolic had twice been to the wharf for gasoline and that on each occasion her skipper had inquired for him. School came to end for the summer that Friday and Toby brought his books home to his little slanting-walled room with a sigh of relief. He didn’t mind studying, for he wanted to learn things, but since the really warm weather had set in, lessons had been a task indeed. One thing, though, that he could congratulate himself on was that he was now through grammar school and next fall would start in at high school over at Johnstown. As long as the weather would allow it, he meant to make the trip back and forth in the Turnover, a matter of three miles from landing to landing.
When the ice came he would have to walk to Riverport, a good two miles, and take the train there for Johnstown, and that wouldn’t be quite so pleasant. Toby’s ambition, though it was as yet not very strong, was to some day take hold of Tucker’s Boat Yard and make it as big and busy and successful as it once had been. But Toby’s father didn’t give him much encouragement. Boat-building at Greenhaven, he declared pessimistically, had had its day. Launches had taken the place of honest sailboats, and there were too many launch-makers in that part of the world. There was no money in it any longer; just a living, and a bare one at that. Toby thought he knew better, but he didn’t argue it. There was time enough yet.
In another four years, when he had learned all they had to teach him at the Johnstown High School, and he was very, very wise, perhaps he would take hold of the business and show his father that there was still money to be made in it. Of course, Toby had not figured out just how he was to do it. There was time enough for that, too!
He and Arnold had their next meeting Saturday morning, a week almost to the minute after their first. Toby had taken some provisions around to a houseboat moored in Nobbs Bay, on the other side of Spanish Harbor, and was chugging lazily back in the Turnover, when from across the water a faint hail reached him. A quarter of a mile away a figure stood on the new steel pier that extended into the bay at the end of Spanish Head, and Toby, shading his eyes, recognized Arnold Deering. Since his errand had been accomplished and there was no more work in sight just then, he turned the launch toward the landing and was soon within talking distance. The Frolic was lying beside the float there, in company with a cedar skiff, and a brilliantly blue canoe rested, keel up, on the planks.
“Hello, Tucker!” called Arnold in friendly fashion. “Where are you going?”
“Nowhere much. I took some grub to that houseboat in there. Going out in the launch?” Toby slid the Turnover up to the end of the float and Arnold came down the sloping gangplank.
“I don’t know. Maybe I will.” He held the Turnover to the landing with one rubber-soled shoe on the gunwale. “Say, I met your father the other day.”
“He told me.”