“What kind of a game is this?” he asks, brisk. “Where are you goin’?”
’Twas Jonadab that answered. “We’re bound,” says he, “for the Bermudas. It’s a lovely place to spend the winter, they tell me,” he says.
That poet never made no remarks. He jumped to the stern and caught hold of the skiff’s pointer. I shoved him out of the way and picked up the boat hook. Jonadab rolled up his shirt sleeves and laid hands on the centerboard stick.
“I wouldn’t, if I was you,” says the cap’n.
Jonadab weighs pretty close to two hundred, and most of it’s gristle. I’m not quite so much, fur’s tonnage goes, but I ain’t exactly a canary bird. Montague seemed to size things up in a jiffy. He looked at us, then at the sail, and then at the shore out over the stern.
“Done!” says he. “Done! And by a couple of ‘come-ons’!”
And down he sets on the thwart.
“Is there anything to drink aboard this liner?” asks Booth Hank Montague.
* * * * *
Well, we sailed all that day and all that night. Course we didn’t reelly intend to make the Bermudas. What we intended to do was to cruise around alongshore for a couple of weeks, long enough for the Stumptons to git back to Dillaway’s, settle the copper bus’ness and break for Montana. Then we was goin’ home again and turn Brown’s relation over to him to take care of. We knew Peter’d have some plan thought out by that time. We’d left a note tellin’ him what we’d done, and sayin’ that we trusted to him to explain matters to Maudina and her dad. We knew that explainin’ was Peter’s main holt.