The farther he got from shore the stronger the wind seemed to blow—a condition which did not impress him favorably, for he was soon out of the bay and upon the ocean, and although the water was not rough, the sea appeared to be very large, and the few boats in sight were far from him; and when he tried to steer toward some of them, his own boat behaved quite provokingly, as any boat will when asked to change her course much while the only sail she carries is a jib.
Still, the experience as a whole was great fun, and whenever Bruce felt a little scare creeping through him, he rallied himself by singing a selection from "A Life on the Ocean Wave," beginning,
We shoot through the ocean foam
Like an ocean bird set free.
But the wind continued to increase in strength, and to come in hard puffs, which Bruce had heard were dangerous. How was the boy to get back to shore? He began to recall some sea stories, which did not now seem as interesting as when he first read them—stories of boys who had drifted out to sea and never been heard of afterward. It does not require many such memories to make a wind-driven boy fearful of what is to come; a man would feel quite as uncomfortable in similar circumstances—being driven out to sea, in the latter part of the afternoon, with no sign of rescue in sight, and he in a boat which he did not know how to manage.
After some hard sailing Bruce determined to let down the jib if it would consent to fall, turn the boat's head toward shore with an oar that lay in the bottom, and then paddle back to the bay; fortunately he had learned paddling on the brook in his native village. Whether he could force the boat against such a wind he did not know, but he had strong arms; besides, the tide certainly would help him, for it was setting shoreward, otherwise it would not have lifted the boat from the beach an hour or two before. He succeeded in getting down the jib, although it hung loosely and caught much wind. He found paddling, in the circumstances, much harder than propelling a narrow raft on the still water of a brook; although the sea was not exactly rough, the deck was a very unsteady platform for his feet, and the wind caused the craft to wildly change direction from time to time; once the rail bore so heavily upon the oar that Bruce had to choose between letting go or going overboard, so of course he let go, and a moment later the boat was again hurrying seaward.
"This," said Bruce, as he went gloomily aft and took the tiller, "must be what the stories mean when they tell about scudding under bare poles. There can't be any doubt about it, although I greatly wish there could."
Up to this time the wind had been freshening Bruce's appetite, but now the boy would have promised to fast a week for the certainty of getting ashore. The sun was steadily declining; not a sail was in sight on the course over which he was drifting. Steamers and other vessels occasionally went up and down the shore, in plain sight of the bay, but what chance was there of his sighting one of them before dark; and what pitiful stories he had read of shipwrecked men whose signals had been unseen or disregarded.
Suddenly he saw, a mile or two out to sea, and in the course he was sailing, something which appeared to be a row-boat containing men who were waving hats and handkerchiefs.
"Hurrah!" shouted Bruce. "They want to get back without rowing. Perhaps some of them will know how to manage this contrary craft. I hope they will have sense enough to row towards me, for if I steer a bit wrong nothing can keep me from running out to sea and missing them."
He quickly got the jib up, so as to sail faster; he knew he could get it down again should he find himself in danger of passing the other boat. Under canvas, Bruce got over the water rapidly, but to his surprise and consternation the men did not attempt to row toward him. Suddenly he exclaimed.