“Well, don’t get waxy about it. I like ‘cal’ate’; it—it’s expressive. Say, what do I do when I get to the landing? Run the bow up on the float, or what?”
“No, you don’t, you idiot! Here, let me have the wheel. You climb out there and take the boat-hook—Gee, we haven’t got any boat-hook, have we? Well, take an oar.”
“The oars are in the locker and you’re sitting on it,” said Bee. “I’ll use my feet.”
So he climbed to the bow and sat there until the launch approached the float and then fended her off with his feet, finally jumping ashore with the painter and making it fast quite knowingly. Then, after seeing the launch safe for the night, the two boys went home to dinner, very proud of their seamanship and very hungry by reason of it.
CHAPTER VI
[Bee Plans An Expedition]
Jack was sitting on the side steps with a shoe in one hand and a blacking-brush in the other. It was nine o’clock Sunday morning and the late breakfast had been over for some time. From the open window of the kitchen, just over his right shoulder, the voices of Aunt Mercy and Susan, the maid, issued cheerfully. Somewhere upstairs Faith was moving about at her morning duties, singing like a thrush. It was a wonderful day. It gave promise of being seasonably warm later on, but just now the sunlight was but comfortably ardent and a little westerly breeze stole across the Neck and the harbor beyond, salty and cool. The house stood some thirty yards from the water, half-way up a little hill green with wild grass and the anemone and sheep-laurel. Herrick’s Cove was a tiny indentation in The Front, as the natives called the ocean side of the Neck, sufficiently protected by jutting ledges at the mouth to make a safe anchorage, with the hill at the back shielding it from the northerly and westerly storms. Between high water and the commencement of the slope a small, steep crescent of beach lay. Into the cove at one side ran a line of spiles supporting both a narrow plank, upon which an agile person could walk to the end, and a four-inch iron pipe. Against the farther spiles the Crystal Spring was moored. The pipe led up hill to the spring and when Jack wanted to fill the tank in the water boat he had only to lift the hatch, drop in the end of a length of cotton hose connecting with the pipe and turn a cock. The cove this morning was as blue as the sky above and as untroubled. The sloop, the tall spiles, and the jutting rocks were reflected as though in a mirror.
The house was a low two-story structure, painted white, with blinds which, originally green, had been wrought upon by the salt winds until they were now of a hue more blue than green. Along the south side of the house a flower bed was already in bloom with old-fashioned spring posies. (Aunt Mercy’s flowers always bloomed a week earlier than any on the Neck.) There was no fence about the house. The front door faced the road that ambled westward to the lighthouse and northward followed the harbor side, ever curving, until it reached the town. Across the road were other houses perched here and there between it and the harbor shore. The settlement was known as Herrick’s Cove, just as the cluster of houses at the other end of Neck was known as The Fort and the residences on the harbor edge half way to the canal, which divided Neck from town, was called The Center. Aside from these settlements Greenhaven Neck was a bare expanse of moorland with here and there a granite ledge lifting its head from the tangle of stunted trees and pepper-bush, sweet-fern, wax-berry and laurel and here and there a bog filled with sphagnum moss and cranberry. One or two summer cottages had gone up on The Front, but in the main, Nature still held full sway.