“I won’t,” exclaimed Harvey. “He’s taken enough paint off the Viking already, I dare say. But”—he added—“you can if you want to. I don’t care.”
So Henry Burns made the offer.
The answer the man made was to order the two youths to work the “pinkey,” as the fishermen call his style of craft, up to the buoy, where he could cut the yachtsmen adrift.
Harvey sprang to the bow of the Viking, drew her up close to the buoy by taking in on the slack of the rope, and held her there by a few turns. Then he snatched up the boat hook. Henry Burns and Tom and Bob likewise armed themselves with the sweeps of the Viking and a piece of spar. They stood ready to repel an attack.
It looked serious. But at this point the two youths aboard the strange boat failed to obey orders. There arose, thereupon, a furious dispute aboard the other craft, the youths remonstrating in what seemed to be a broken English, and the man railing at them fiercely in English that was plain, but still had not just the Yankee accent; in the course of which the man at the tiller rushed upon one of them, and would have struck him had not the other youth interfered.
It ended in the wrathful stranger taking his craft ahead, quite a distance up the harbour, ignoring Henry Burns’s offer to moor astern of the Viking.
“Just as well he didn’t stay,” commented Henry Burns. “I don’t think he would improve on longer acquaintance, do you, Jack?”
“Well, hardly,” said Harvey. “I guess he must be one of those chaps Captain Sam spoke of.”
“I wonder if he will make us any more trouble to-night,” remarked Bob.
“No, he’ll have to fight it out with his own crew first,” said Harvey. “But I’ll just keep an eye out for a little while. You fellows can turn in.”