"It will be a nice little sail," Will laughed. "If you happen to meet a Spanish cruiser, you might capture her and bring her home."
He was on his guard for another practical joke, and did not intend to be caught. But Vic walked up to him and seized his arm with a very earnest grip.
"Don't think I am trying to play another trick on you, Will," she said, "for I am not. You don't know what danger this storm puts both our fathers in. I may be able to help them, and I am going to try."
Her earnest manner left no doubt that she meant what she said, and Will became serious.
"I don't know whether a small boat can live in that sea," he said, "but if you start for Cuba, I am going with you."
Vic was not prepared for such an answer as this; but she had known Will only for a few days. Any of his schoolmates could have told her that where there was real danger to be faced he would be at the front. She protested against his going, for she knew the peril of such a trip in so small a boat; but Will was firm as a rock, and even while she urged him to stay behind he waded out to the sharpie and began to make it ready.
"If your father is in danger," he said, "so is mine. You know I am going if you go, so what's the use of talking?"
That eighty-mile sail across the Florida Strait in a raging storm is one of the things that Will cannot be induced to talk much about. It is a sort of nightmare to him. There was not only the physical danger, which was serious enough, but there was the chance that their fathers might land safely, and then blame them severely for undertaking such a voyage.
Vic had put a jug of water and a box of biscuits under the stern seat, and she took the tiller as a matter of course. Will was kept busy baling out the water, which came over the sides in a fury of spray. But Vic knew that that spray was all in their favor. The force of the wind was so great that it kept the sea down by sweeping off the crests of waves, though it made an appalling smother of foam.
If a boy can sit with his heart in his throat for nearly nine hours at a stretch, Will Hall did it that day. In a few hours the spray made crusts of salt upon both their faces, and in the furious gale talking was almost impossible. But through it all Vic kept the little sharpie headed due south, for she knew that the schooner would try to land just to the eastward of Cardenas.