Toby shook his head. “I thought I’d better wait until I had some more. Only thing is”—he frowned deeply—“I don’t know how to get any more! I’ve been thinking and thinking!”
“Oh, well, there’s lots of time yet. Come on down to the shed and see how the boat’s getting along.”
The knockabout was coming fast and Arnold never tired of watching Mr. Tucker and “Long Tim” and “Shorty” at work. Long Tim’s full name was Timothy Tenney. He stood fully six feet three inches tall when he straightened up, but that was seldom since the bending over to his work for some forty-odd years had put a perceptible stoop to his shoulders. Long Tim was thin and angular and weather beaten, with a fringe of grizzled whiskers from ear to ear, and very little in the way of hair above the whiskers. He loved to talk, and was a mine of strange, even unbelievable information which he was quite ready to impart in his nasal drawl. “Shorty” was Joe Cross, a small, square chunk of a man who had come ashore years before from a Newfoundland lumber schooner and had forgotten to return until the schooner had sailed again. Shorty had a family somewhere in Canada, and was forever threatening to go back to it, but never got further than New York. Long Tim came from a family of boat-builders, but Shorty had learned the trade under Mr. Tucker. Both were capable workmen, although Long Tim looked on Shorty as still merely an apprentice, and shook his head dolefully when he was entrusted with any more particular task than driving a nail.
If Arnold could have had his way he would have spent most of his waking hours sitting in the boat shed with his feet in sawdust and shavings and auger chips watching the knockabout grow and listening to the ceaseless drawling of Long Tim. But Toby wasn’t satisfied to dawdle like that and hailed Arnold off to various more lively occupations. Several afternoons during the next ten days were spent by Arnold, none too enthusiastically, in practicing ball with the Spanish Head team in preparation for that approaching game.
Toby, too, put in a little time in a similar way, but the trouble with Toby’s team was that it was impossible to get all the fellows together at the same time. Usually they were shy from one to four players and were forced to fill up the ranks with such volunteers as were on hand. Arnold brought stirring tales of practice over at the Head and predicted overwhelming victory for his nine. But Toby refused to become alarmed. The Towners had won once, and he believed they could do it again. Even if they couldn’t there was still no harm done. Baseball was only baseball and some one had to lose!
It was on a Wednesday, just a week after that first contest, that Toby stood on the town landing float and waited for Arnold to come over from the Head in the Frolic. At low tide it was finicky work getting up to the boat-yard pier, and Arnold tied up at the town float instead. The hour was still early, for in the Tucker cottage breakfast was at six-thirty in summer, and Toby had cleaned the spark-plug on the Turnover, mended a window screen, walked to the grocery store and back on an errand, and reached the landing, and, behind him, the clock in the church tower showed the time to be still well short of eight. Arnold had promised to come across early, however, since they had planned to run up to Riverport and get some hardware for the knockabout which was waiting for them at the freight depot. Save that Toby was seated across the bow of a dory instead of on a box, he presented much the same appearance as at our first meeting with him. Perhaps his skin was a little deeper brown, and perhaps, as he gazed again across the harbor and bay, his face was a trifle more thoughtful—or his thoughtfulness a bit more earnest. And he was whistling a new tune under his breath, something that Phebe had of late been playing incessantly on the old-fashioned square piano in the cottage parlor. The harbor was quiet and almost deserted. On a black sloop, moored well off the landing, a man was busy with pail and swab, but, excepting for the gulls, he was the only moving thing in sight until footsteps sounded on the pier above and a man descended the gangplank.
He was a middle-aged man in a suit of blue serge and square-toed shoes, and he carried a brown leather satchel. He looked like a person in a hurry, Toby concluded, although there was no apparent reason for his hurry. He looked impatiently about the float and then at Toby.
“Isn’t there a ferry here?” he demanded.
“No, sir. Where do you want to go?”
“Johnstown. I thought there was a ferry over there. I was told there was.” He viewed Toby accusingly.