“Hold on there, Dick; I ain't got no clothes or nothin'. And you owe me my pay—”
“You 'll have to go to Cap'n Stenzenberger about that. Here, Pink, heave him off. Quick, now!”
“Don't you lay your hand on me, Pink Harper—”
But the words were lost. The young sailor in the red shirt fairly pitched him over the rail. The life saver, running alongside, gave him a hand. Captain Peters was leaning out impatiently from his wheel-house door, and now at the signal he dove back and hurriedly rang for full steam ahead; it was no place to run chances. And as the schooner passed out into the open lake, leaving the lighthouse behind her, and soon afterward casting off the tug, there was no time to look back at the raging figure on the pier. Though once, to be sure, Dick had turned with a laugh and shouted out a few lines of a wild parody on the song of the day, “Baby Mine.”
The song proved so amusing that, when they were free of the tug and were careening gayly off to the southwest with all fast on board and a boiling sea around them, he took it up again. And braced at a sharp angle with the deck, one eye on the sails, another cast to windward, his brown hands knotted around the spokes of the wheel, he sang away at the top of his lungs:—=
"He is coming down the Rhine.
With a bellyful of wine,"=
Young Harper worked his way aft along the upper rail. His eye fell on the figure of his captain, and he laughed and nodded.
“Lively goin', Cap'n.”
Lively it certainly was.