[DARE'S CRUISE;]
OR, THE DORY THAT FOUND ITS WAY HOME.
BY ELIOT McCORMICK.
"What a pretty boy!"
Dare laughed and blushed as she jammed down the tiller of her little dory to let the larger boat, from which the remark had come, pass by.
"That ain't a boy," she heard a rude voice reply; "that's that Peters girl from Star Island."
Dare's laugh died out, and the flush turned into an angry red. The first speaker she did not know. It was a girl—a little younger than herself, Dare thought—with a frank, pleasant face and winning voice. But the other was a familiar foe, who had tormented Dare for ten years. Tom Suydam, she verily believed, was the most hateful boy that ever lived. Because he was a rich man's son, and boarded at the hotel every summer, while she was a fisherman's daughter who lived on the beach, he seemed to feel at liberty to tease and annoy her in every possible way. When she was a little girl he had amused himself by destroying her castles in the sand; and now that she was thirteen years old, and did not build sand castles, he would make uncomplimentary remarks loud enough for her to overhear. Dare almost hated Tom Suydam.
It was not surprising that she should be mistaken for a boy. Her short clustering hair, firm mouth, and ruddy complexion gave her face a boyish look, while the sailor hat, and blue flannel waist open sailorwise at the throat, added to the illusion. The costume was nothing more than a girl's bathing suit; but Dare found it convenient for boating, and not in the way when the boat capsized, as had once or twice happened, notwithstanding her good seamanship, and she had to swim. She could sail a boat, Captain Peters proudly declared, better than any boy around the Shoals, and there wasn't a trick of the wind she did not know. In this respect, at any rate, Dare felt a sense of superiority over Tom Suydam. He might be richer, and know more, but he couldn't manage even a row-boat. Dare wondered, as she looked back over her shoulder, and saw the little skiff driving ahead under the fresh southeasterly breeze, how the sweet-faced, gentle-voiced girl who was his companion would trust herself to his care, and how, indeed, she could go with him at all. Dare knew that Tom had no sisters. "She must be his cousin," the girl concluded, as she hauled over the sail on the other tack.