The two youths fell silent. Carefully, they looked away from each other, for neither one wished to betray the strong emotions that held him at that moment. Their feelings were a mixture of pride and love of country and a certain awe in the presence of its beauty and grandeur.
“Hey,” Jerry said, suddenly breaking the spell. “What’s that light out there?”
He pointed and Sandy Steele’s eyes followed his finger.
“I’ll bet it’s another lake boat,” Sandy said. “Sure! That’s what it is. And there’s another one. There must be a half dozen of them, Jerry.”
Jerry James chuckled. “Say,” he said, “this lake’s a regular freeway, isn’t it?”
Sandy nodded. “I think I hear Cookie calling us, Jerry,” he said. “Let’s go below.”
On their way down, Sandy went on, “We’d better keep what we know about Captain West a secret. We’ll wait until we get to Buffalo to telephone Mr. Kennedy. Of course, if we’re delayed or a storm comes up, we’ll have to think of something else. Who knows? Maybe we’ll stop in Detroit or some other Great Lakes port, and we can call him from there.”
“Right,” Jerry said, and then, “Hey, do you smell what I smell?”
Sandy did, indeed, and the eyes of both of them went wide with wonder at the sight of the breakfast Cookie had set up for them on a tiny table at the end of his gleaming, spotless, aluminum galley.
“Eat hearty, boys,” Cookie said, bobbing his bald head in the direction of the ham and eggs and stacks of toast and jars of jelly. “Plenty more where that came from.”