“Now, don’t be so patronizing about your boat. Wait till you see how mine behaves.”
He dropped the discussion and got her launched. Is there anything prettier than a pretty boat floating beside a dock!
The next morning when we came down we found her half full of water. “She’ll be all right now she’s soaked up,” said Jonathan, and we baled her dry and went off to get our stuff.
I delayed to buy provisions, and when I came back I found Jonathan standing on the float surrounded by plunder of all sorts. He answered my hail rather solemnly.
“See here! When this stuff’s all stowed, where are we going to sit? That’s what’s worrying me.”
I came down the plank. “Well, let’s eliminate.”
We eliminated. We took out extra shoes and coats and “town clothes,” we cut down as far as we dared, and expressed a big bundle home. The rest we got into two sailor’s dunnage bags, one waterproof, the other nearly so, and one big water-tight metal box. Then there were the guns, and the provisions, and the charts in a long tin tube, and there was a lantern—a clumsy thing, which we lashed to a seat. It was always in the way and proved of very little use, but we thought we ought to take it.
While we worked, some loungers gathered on the wharf above and watched us with that tolerant curiosity that loungers know so well how to assume. As we got in and took up our oars, one of them called out, “Now, if you only had a little motor there in the stern, you’d be all right.”
“He heard you,” I said, “but he can’t believe you really said it.”
The oars fell into unison, there was the dip of their blades, the grating chunk of the rowlocks—_dip-ke-chunk, dip-ke-chunk_. As we fell into our stroke the little boat began to respond, the water swished at her bows and gurgled under her stern. The wharf fell away behind us, the houses back of it came into sight, then the wooded hills behind. The whole town began to draw together, with its church steeples as its centers.
“I told you! Look at us now! Look at that buoy!”
_Dip-ke-chunk, dip-ke-chunk_—the red buoy swept by us and dropped into the blue background of dancing waves.
“Are we really off? Is it really happening?” I said joyously.
“Do you like it?” said Jonathan over his shoulder.