Of course the other boys considered that Monkey’s achievement shed more or less luster on the entire organization; and for the next half hour they felt themselves of considerable importance aboard that boat, and doubtless puffed out their chests more or less in consequence.
Alas! pride is often doomed to have a fall, and it was almost due in this case, though few of those lads suspected from what quarter their Waterloo was fated to come.
They sat there looking back at the beautiful scene, as the Vixen passed down the harbor. Bunker Hill monument stood up like a finger pointing to the heavens, and as all the boys had climbed to its top the first thing that morning, they paid more attention to this than any other feature that opened before them.
“There’s Nantasket Beach!” they heard someone, who was probably a Boston man, say near by, as he pointed to a strip of shore that seemed to be given up to all manner of merry-go-rounds, Ferris wheels, and the like, to be found at shore resorts such as have become known under the name of “Coney Islands.”
“Sorry we didn’t have time to run down there,” remarked Billy, who was moving uneasily about along the deck. “Mebbe we’ll get a chance to do it when we come back. Let’s see, that will be in about twelve days, won’t it, Hugh?”
“Yes, but I hope you’re not counting the days already, Billy?” remarked the other with a twinkle in his eye, for he suspected what was coming.
“What, me? Well, I should guess not. If it was forty days, it would make me all the happier. But we must be getting out to sea, aren’t we, Hugh? The boat has begun to dip the queer way they told me it would when it had left the harbor behind. And say, what an odd, nasty motion it has, too?”
“Oh! let up on that, Billy! Just as if we don’t know it without you forcing the fact in our faces,” Walter Osborne told him, for Walter was sitting there, holding his head in his hands, and apparently trying to keep from seeing how things had begun to move up and down in that dizzy fashion.
As the roll of the sea became more pronounced, for it was rather rough outside, first one fellow and then another made some silly excuse and slipped away. Several of the Reserves seemed to be deeply interested in the green water and the white foam under the vessel’s side, for they kept leaning over steadily.
Hugh was really the last to give in, and he only felt that he ought to be looking after the other fellows who had gone below to their hammocks. He found every one of the seven there “taking things easy” they assured him, though several had white faces, and their merriment was rather forced.