The result was not, accurately speaking, a chorus, but they made the air ring with sounds until Kate was forced to drop the bell and cover her ears.
When a pause was made, out of sheer exhaustion, by boys and dog, they seemed to hear a voice out of the fog.
“Coming!” was the word they heard repeated.
They rang the bell after an interval, and Josh, seeming to understand, lifted up his mighty wail and cast it on the fog.
“Coming!” The answer came this time clearly from the voice of Captain Green.
In ten minutes more his little boat was drawn up on the beach and he was on his way home. There was no school that day. There was no school on the morrow, nor for a week, because the lad lay very ill—and then there was no school in the tower room any more, for there was no little grandson, for love of whom to teach.
Chapter XII.
September was come, and the day on which Frank was to go to school was drawing very near. Frank himself was devoting every minute that he could get to bluefishing, and became very greatly irritated at whatever came in the way of his pleasure. He even came to regard this going to school as something that ought to be put off until bluefishing was over; and as for “that provoking Harry Cornwall, he was good for nothing at all—all the time doing something in the lane, digging the potatoes, or pulling onions, or anything but go a-fishing, as he, Frank Hallock, wished him to do. Why, he hadn’t been out with him to the island more than three times since September came. And as for Kate, she was no good at fishing, she wouldn’t bait his hook, but just wanted to pull out the fish for her own self.” And yet Frank admitted that he might have let her come out with him in the Clover. It was a pretty boat—white and green—that lay on the ripple of the blue Sound that sweet September afternoon, and anyone passing it and beholding the face of Frank Hallock, lighted up with exultation as he whipped into his boat a gleaming bluefish, a little larger than its fellows, would have thought “What a fine-looking lad that is!” A cheery voice from a passing boat, whose approach Frank had not seen, called out, “Any good luck to-day?”
“First-rate luck,” answered Frank. “Where going, Victor?”