"I thought you'd been captured and destroyed!" wheezed the hippopotamus, scrambling hastily aboard her raft. "Next time you fly off, take me aboard or give me a balloon sail too. I'm so full of salt water I'm perfectly pickled and somebody'll have to scrape the barnacles off my hide."
"But we've brought you a present," called Tandy, leaning far over the taffrail, "a vegetable vine that will keep you supplied with fresh vegetables as long as we're at sea. SEE! DEEEE Aye DEE OH!"
"Avast and balaydeeaye!" barked Samuel Salt grimly. "Let's get away from here. This is no way for able-bodied seamen to talk." Rushing from wheel to mast, he quickly set his sail. "Ahoy! Ahoy Dee Oy Dee OH!" he yodelled, then, very red in the face, he blew three shrill blasts on his fog horn, swung his ship about and the Crescent Moon, with a spanking breeze on her quarter, went skimming away toward the southern skyline.
CHAPTER 12
Fog
The evening had blown up raw and cold, and after carrying an old tarpaulin down to cover Nikobo, Tandy had come shivering back to the main cabin. Samuel Salt had close reefed his topsails and double reefed his courses, adjusted his mechanical steering gear, and now sat beside the fire examining a heap of the glittering crystals from Alberif's island.
"Just sketch Peakenspire Island on the chart, there where I've made the cross," he directed, looking up with an absent smile as the little boy came over to warm himself at the cheerful blaze. "You're such a hand with a brush, even in so small a place you can give a good idea of the City of Bridges."
"And a good idea they are," murmured Ato, who was busy mending his fishing nets on the other side of the fireplace. "In every port we learn something new, eh, Mate? All mountains, no matter how high and peaked, could be lived on if they were properly bridged."