For the next few minutes there was not much talking, and the boys devoted themselves to making a wreck of the good things heaped before them. Their morning in the salt air on the open sea had put them in fine fettle and they had enormous appetites.
“Well,” said Fred, when at last they were satisfied, “we have to hand it to you as a cook, Mr. Lee. You certainly know how to make things taste good.”
“Lester comes rightly by his talent in fixing up the eats,” declared Bill.
“A sailor has to learn to turn his hand to anything,” laughed their host. “He gets into lots of places where he has to depend on himself alone or go hungry. I’ve been shipwrecked twice in the course of my life, and I’ve had to learn to eat all sorts of things and to cook them in a way that would help me get them down.”
“Talking about shipwrecks,” he went on, as he filled and lighted his pipe and settled down for an after-dinner smoke, “reminds me of the fellow you 73 say you picked up yesterday. How did he come there? Go ahead and spin your yarn.”
“It wasn’t exactly a shipwreck,” explained Lester. “The boat wasn’t smashed, and as a matter of fact we found it for Ross again to-day. It was a motor boat––”
“A motor boat!” interrupted Mr. Lee, with a sniff. He had the distrust felt by most deep-water sailors, of what he called “these pesky modern contraptions.”
“Ross was tinkering with some part of the machinery that had gone wrong,” continued Lester, “when a big wave caught him and carried him overboard. We were near by at the time and we made for him and got him.”
“Yanked him in with a boathook, I suppose,” said his father.
“We were too late for that,” answered Lester. “He had gone down, but Fred grabbed a rope and dived over after him. It was a close call, but he got him, and then we dragged them both in.”