“Now, Paul, you know very well that I hold no position with the Meteorological Bureau, and therefore you shouldn’t lay the sins of the weather to me.”
“Huh! ain’t you smart?” he grunted.
You see, Paul had awakened in rather a quarrelsome frame of mind while—well, I was hungry, too (it was long past our dinner hour) and so felt in a tantalizing mood. If we had not been at just these odds on this lovely September evening, the incidents which follow might never have occurred. Out of this foolish beginning of a quarrel came a chain of circumstances which entirely changed the current of my life. Had I held my tongue I would have been saved much sorrow and peril, and many, many regrets.
“I’m smart—I admit it,” said I, cooly; “but I can’t govern the wind. We’ll get in by bedtime.”
“And nothing to eat aboard,” growled Paul.
“There’s the fish you caught,” said I, chuckling.
Paul had had abominable luck all day, the only thing he landed being what we Bolderhead boys called a “grunter”—a frog-mouthed fish of most unpleasant aspect and of absolutely no use as food. All it did when he shook it off his hook in disgust was to swell up like a toy balloon and emit an objective grunt whenever it was poked. Funny, but these “grunters” always reminded me of Paul.
Now, at my suggestion, my cousin broke into another tirade of abuse of the Wavecrest, and what he termed my carelessness. I didn’t care much what he said about me, and I suppose there was some reason for his criticism; I should not have gone outside the inlet without more than just a bite of luncheon in the cuddy. But when he referred to my bonnie sloop as “an old tub” and said it wasn’t rigged right and that I didn’t know how to sail her, then—well, I leave it to you if it wouldn’t have made you huffy? You know how it is yourself. Wait till the next fellow makes disparaging remarks about your bicycle, for instance or your motor cycle, or canoe, or what-not, and see how you feel!
“What’s the use of talking that way, Paul?” I demanded, interrupting him. “You know the Wavecrest is by far the lightest-footed craft of her class in Bolderhead Harbor.”
“No such thing!” he declared. “She’s a measly, good-for-nothing old tub.”