“I see your two beauty-spots on the sail,” he said, laughing heartily, and pointing to the places where the sail had been neatly mended. “That was a clever trick. Ha! ha! How did you happen to think of that little dodge of tying up the reef-points? Guess you know more about a sailboat than some folks seem to think, eh?”
Harry Brackett, taken by surprise, made a feeble attempt at denial, but Mr. Carleton wouldn’t listen to it. He had an assertive, positive way, that Harry Brackett could not withstand. So the boy ended by admitting the act, vastly relieved to find that a man like Mr. Carleton, of whom his father spoke so highly, regarded it as a really good joke.
“Makes me feel like a boy again, for all the world,” chuckled Mr. Carleton. “Count me in on the next one. I’m a good deal of a boy, myself.”
Also, did the astute Mr. Carleton feign to regard as a joke an incident that occurred some days later, of a more serious nature, and which he discovered quite by chance.
It had come on foggy, with a lazy wind from the southeast, and for several days the island and the bay had been obscured by thick banks of fog, so that one could not see a boat’s length ahead. The steamers came in cautiously, sounding their whistles, to note, if they were near land, how quick the echo, or an answering fog-bell, came back to them.
There was no sailing, and the boys remained ashore, mostly up at the comfortable Warren cottage, or within the tents. They tended the lobster-pots when the fog did not roll in too thick; but for two entire days it was too heavy for them to find the buoys, and they did no fishing.
It happened on one of these days that, finding it dull in the town, Mr. Carleton invested in a suit of oilskins and rowed down along the shore, where he dropped a line off the ledges and fished for cunners. He was a smart fisherman, and caught a good mess in a short running of the flood-tide.
“I’ll get the captain to clean them, and have Mrs. Curtis make me one of those fine chowders for supper,” he said, as he pushed the basket of fish under the seat, put the oars into the oar-locks and proceeded to row in.
But Mr. Carleton miscalculated a little, in the fog, and rowed some distance down the shore before he discovered his mistake. He was turning to row back, when the sound of some one else rowing attracted his attention. He was close to shore, out of sight.
Presently the boat came dimly into view through the fog, and Mr. Carleton made out the occupant to be Harry Brackett. He was about to hail him, when the rower turned his boat inshore and stepped out. Then Mr. Carleton observed that the object at which Harry Brackett had arrived was the lobster-car owned by the campers. Mr. Carleton quietly stepped out of his own boat, and walked up into the bushes.