“You’re just in time. Sit right down,” cried Captain Sam hospitably. “Baked beans and brown bread is what you get, you know. I can always tell it’s Sunday morning, as soon as I wake up, by the smell from the oven. Haw! haw!”
“Hello, what’s the matter?” he added, seeing the expressions of distress on their faces. “Nothing gone wrong, is there?”
They told him, hurriedly.
Captain Sam Curtis raised his brawny right hand, which clutched an iron knife with which he had been dexterously engaged in conveying beans from his dish to his mouth, and brought it down on the table with a smash that made the coffee-cups jump in their saucers.
“I knew it and I said it!” he cried. “I didn’t like the looks of that Carleton from the first—did I, Nancy Jane?”
“No, you didn’t, Sam,” responded Mrs. Curtis. “You declared he had a queer way with him—though I couldn’t see it.”
“The villain!” roared Captain Sam. “A boat-thief, is he? We’ll catch him, if we have to sail to New York after him. Nancy Jane, throw some bread and cheese and that cold meat and brown bread into a box, and we’ll get away quicker’n scat.”
He bolted a cup of coffee at one swallow and unloaded his plate of beans with a rapidity truly marvellous, urging the boys, between gulps, to do likewise. But they had not much appetite and ate only a little, hastily.
“He’s the man—the scoundrel!” exclaimed Captain Sam, wrathfully, as they gathered his belongings and prepared to leave the cottage. “And didn’t I see him night before last, as sure as a man can see? I was coming down through the pasture from the post-office, about dusk, and there was a man ahead in the path; and when he heard me coming behind him, he slips off into the bushes and cuts across lots. Once he looks back for a moment, over his shoulder, and I says, ‘Why, that looks as much like that man Carleton that boarded at my house as one pea looks like another.’ But he didn’t answer when I called to him; only pushed ahead, out of the way. And I thought it was queer—and now I know it.”
The Nancy Jane, Captain Sam’s big fishing-boat, named for his wife, and, like that good woman, plump and sturdy of build, and not dashing, was swinging idly at its mooring. They jumped aboard, lifted the tender aboard also, so it would not drag and delay them, ran the mainsail and jib up, cast off, and stood down alongshore. The chase of the Viking had begun.