“What do you think,” asked Harvey, as they sailed on up the bay, “will they keep up the fight for the boat? Will the squire take it to court, or will they quit, now they find themselves outwitted?”
“They’ll give it up,” said Henry Burns. “They would have tried to lie it through if they could have got the boat away from here. But now that we have it, they will look at it differently. They’ll find, when they get back to the village, too, that the Warren boys were down here, and that will settle it.” Henry Burns was right.
John Hart and his comrades, astounded, on awakening, to find the Surprise nowhere to be seen, had jumped to the conclusion that the crew had stolen down and cut her loose.
“We’ll take it out of them!” he had cried, fiercely; and, followed by his no less irate comrades, had dashed up to the old cabin. Another disappointment. And still another, when they had searched all the shores of the Thoroughfare and examined its waters, and realized that the boat was gone.
“Well, we’ll get it yet, if they have carried it off,” young Brackett ventured to suggest.
“We’ll do nothing of the kind,” cried John Hart, angrily. “You idiot! Can’t you see we’re beaten? Some one has been down in the night and helped them. That must have been true, what they said about the other chaps. The best thing we can do is to keep quiet about what we have done, or we’ll have the whole town laughing at us for working on their boat.”
Young Harry Brackett looked pained.
CHAPTER IX.
HARRY BRACKETT PLAYS A JOKE
Southport, albeit not a place of great hilarity, took a night off once a fortnight or so, and enjoyed itself in rollicking fashion. Up the island, about a mile and a half from the harbour, there was a small settlement, consisting of a half-dozen houses clustered together, overlooking a pretty cove that made in from the western shore. They were a part of the town of Southport, though separated from the rest. It had been, in fact, the original place of settlement, and there was a church and town hall there.
This town hall, bare and uninviting in appearance for the most of its existence, brightened up smartly on these fortnightly occasions, putting on usually some vestments of running pine and other festoons of trailing vines, and adorned with wild flowers in their season.