“Hope we weren’t too much in the way, sir,” said Billy and Chester, and Alec added his word to the general chorus. Then, with a parting invitation from the surfmen to come again, they departed.
It was a long time before the boys were to pay another visit to the Red Key Life Saving Station, and when they did so, it was to be under very different conditions, They saw it next at midsummer when the great ocean was calm, when gentle breezes filled the sails of vessels passing along the horizon, and when the sun shone benignly over land and sea.
Meanwhile, soon after their arrival at Palmdune, and in the midst of preparations for their cruise on the Arrow, they wrote a joint letter to Keeper Anderson and his crew thanking him again for his kindness to them. To this letter Mr. Sands added a pair of field-glasses for each of the crew,—even better than those they already possessed,—and a huge packing-case full of books and magazines.
Roy Norton arrived on the day following the boys’ return. He had read newspaper accounts of the unusual storm along the coast, and he was much interested in hearing all about the adventures of the youthful lifesavers.
From the first, the boys liked Norton; in many ways he reminded them of George Rawson, their assistant scout master at Pioneer Camp. Unlike Rawson, however, who was tall and lean and sinewy, Norton was a young man of medium height, rather thick-set and muscular, yet agile and quick in action. He, too, possessed an apparently inexhaustible fund of energy and good humor.
Captain Lemuel Vinton, who met them one morning on the main fishing dock at Santario, proved to be a stout, grizzled, salt water veteran of fifty years or more. He greeted them with gruff cordiality and escorted them aboard the Arrow, where he assigned them their sleeping quarters.
With him, as their future guide through the Everglades, was Wastanugee, a Seminole Indian who answered to the more convenient nick-name of Dave. He was much given to living among the whites, and, while it was clear that he liked civilized ways and also hard dollars, or “chalks,” as the Indians term them, it soon became evident,—toward the end of the first day’s cruise,—that he disliked and dreaded “the big salt,” as he called the ocean.
“Uh! Bad medicine!” he grunted. “Bad weather. Dave better stay home. Go home, anyhow, when get Big Cypress Harbor. Incah!”
Having baited the boys’ hooks, he settled himself resignedly within the folds of his blanket, stretched out his trousered legs and moccasined feet, and yawned loudly.
“Best kind of fishing weather, this,” said Alec. “Tarpon are bound to bite now, aren’t they, Captain?”