Tom stood still, put the pipe in his mouth, and took a pull on it. Great Jehovah, it tasted worse than sulphur and molasses that the old women dosed you with in the spring. It tasted worse than wormwood and bear’s grease, worse than dragonroot tea. Ike Baldwin stepped into the water now, and Tom followed at a little distance. By and by he felt the river floor sloping away under his feet, but he managed to keep on wading, though the others launched forth and swam. He held his head high and his neck still, and kept puffing on the pipe. The schooner was only a little way off, stranded in shallow water, but it seemed to Tom as if he would never get there, with the ill-smelling wooden bowl and its little treasure of fire. Maybe they wouldn’t need it, he thought, but if they did they would need it bad, and he meant to have it on hand.
Once a British ball struck close by, throwing up a shower of spray that left him shaken and half blinded, but he kept puffing away at the pipe and forged steadily ahead. Then another ball struck even closer. The British were finding the range, he thought. They must have realized what their opponents meant to do.
When he reached the schooner, she was so sharply tilted that he found it as easy to climb aboard her as it would have been to swarm up a sloping beach. The other lads were there ahead of him, busy spreading pitch on a pile of canvas mattresses and hammocks fetched up from the sleeping quarters below, spreading it on the dry parts of the deck above water line.
A brisk wind sang through the Diana’s broken rigging. It struck cold on Tom’s bare shoulders and drove the last of the mist away. Sounds of firing came from the British sloop, but he forgot the sloop. He cupped his hands about the pipe bowl to shelter its living contents from the wind. He took a long puff.
“So this is the way Stark trains his lads!” Isaac Baldwin’s voice lashed out at him. He turned sharply and looked into the grim, angry face of their leader.
Tom took the pipe cautiously from his mouth. “’T hasn’t got nothing to do with Stark,” he said.
“If this were a regular engagement, you could be court-martialed. Smoking a pipe! Skulking here smoking a pipe! Look at the other lads!”
Tom stared miserably at the busy group who were still heaping up whatever inflammables they could find. Then he put the pipe back in his mouth and gave another dogged puff.
“Here! Give me that!” Livid with rage, Ike Baldwin made a grab for the pipe.
Tom put one hand up before his face and ducked away. The deck under his feet was worn by the tramp of many men, and it was slippery with morning dew. He fell, half recovered himself, and then went down on his knees, his teeth still clamped to the pipestem.