“A fig for his honor!” said Jack. “I’m not afraid of his honor. And as for being away when he comes back, why, that I shall not. He’ll be sure not to be back from Annapolis for a week to come.”
The memory that followed was of a long sail in the open boat of some forty miles or so in the hot sun and the swift, brisk wind; a memory of sitting perched on the up-tilted weather-rail listening to Dennis and the negroes chattering together in the strange jabbering English that was becoming so familiar to him now.
It was pretty late in the afternoon when they approached the fishing-ground. Dennis leaned over the rail every now and then, and peered down into the water, as the hoy drifted along close-hauled to the wind. One of the negroes stood ready to drop the sail, and the other stood in the bow to throw over the stone that served as an anchor when Dennis should give the order. “Let go!” shouted Dennis suddenly, and the sail fell with a rattle of the block and tackle, and in a heap of canvas. At the same time the negro in the bow threw the stone overboard with a great loud splash.
Jack and Little Coffee were the first to drop their lines into the water. Jack sat watching the negro boy; he hoped with all his might that he might catch the first fish, but it did not seem possible that he could catch a fish in that little open spot of the wide, wide stretch of water. Then all of a sudden there came a sharp, quivering pull at the hook, and he instantly began hauling in the wet and dripping line wildly, hand over hand. He thought for a moment that he had lost the fish; then there came a renewed tugging at his line, and in another second he had jerked the shining thing into the boat, where it lay flashing and splashing and flapping upon the boards of the bottom. “I caught the first fish, Little Coffee!” he shouted.
“Look dar, now,” said Little Coffee, testily. “Fish just bite my hook, and you talk and scare ‘um away.”
Jack jeered derisively, and Dennis burst out laughing, while Little Coffee glowered at Jack in glum sullenness.
They fished all that afternoon, and it was toward evening when they hoisted up the anchor stone. Two of the negroes poled the hoy to the shore. Jack was the first to jump from the bow of the boat to the white, sandy beach, littered with a tangle of water-grasses and driftwood, washed up by the waves. A steep bluff bank of sand overlooked the water, and Jack ran scrambling up the sliding, sandy steep, and stood looking around him. For some little distance the ground was open, and there was a low wooden shed, maybe fifty or sixty paces away; beyond it stood the outskirts of the virgin forest. He stood and gazed about him, realizing very keenly that this was the new world, and sensing a singular thrilling delight at the wildness and strangeness of everything.