Altogether, with his clumsiness in the matter of reconstruction, the squire consumed the rest of the morning repairing the drawer he had wrecked.
Then, when he had finished his work, he strode away up the street and made a purchase. The purchase was a fine, big boiled lobster—just a shade redder than the squire’s face as he paid for it. But, having paid for it, he took it back to the yacht and ate it for his dinner—all but one claw. That claw he wished to save. He was so careful of it, indeed, that he put it away in a certain secret drawer under the third locker on the starboard side.
“No, they’re not coming,” he said, that evening, to John Hart and Ed Sanders, on their return. “Too bad. Got a telegram saying they can’t come. The sailing party’s given up. Shame, isn’t it? However, I’ve got some business I’m going to attend to before I go home. We’ll stay the week out. Your pay goes on just the same. So you needn’t say anything to the boys about my not using their yacht. They might think they got a shade the best of me. It’s all right, though. I can make use of the time.”
The squire, in truth, was too ashamed to return so suddenly. He spent the week in Mayville; and of all miserable weeks in his existence, that week was the most dismal of any.
Saturday came, and it was a day of fitful weather. Part of the day it rained. Then there were signs of clearing, with the wind sharp and squally from the west. They waited till mid-afternoon, and then the weather improving a little, the squire gave the order to start. He dreaded the sail, but he would wait no longer. They went across the bay under two reefs, and the squire’s hair stood on end all the way.
It was shortly after supper, and Henry Burns and Jack Harvey sat with their friends, the Warren boys, on the veranda of the Warren cottage. The wind was still high, and now and then there came a brief rain-squall.
“I wonder if the Viking will be in,” said George Warren.
“Possibly,” replied Harvey; “but, if she isn’t, we’ll give the squire another day. It’s stiff wind for him to sail in. What worries me, is whether the crew are all right or not. They’ve been gone a week almost, and they’re way down ’round Stoneland somewhere.”
“Oh, they are all right,” said Henry Burns.
And yet, if Henry Burns could have seen the position of the good yacht Surprise, at that precise moment, he might not have thought she was exactly all right. For the yacht Surprise was hung up on a sand-bar, some ten miles below Stoneland, among the islands; and the crew had already worked an hour, in vain attempts to get her off.