The Rival Campers Afloat: or, The Prize Yacht Viking. Smith Ruel Perley
the wheel. Then he quickly trimmed in on the sheets, and the jibs began to draw.
“Most beginners,” he said, “trim the jib in flat on the other side the minute they cast off the leeward sheet. But that delays her in coming about.”
Again the quiet smile on the face of Henry Burns, but he merely answered, “That’s so.”
They stood down abreast the wharf and brought her up, with sails fluttering. Jack Harvey, looking up from the side to the figure above on the wharf, called out, “Hello, were you waving to us?”
“Why, yes,” responded the man, “I was. Are you going down the river far?”
“Bound down to Southport,” said Harvey.
“Good!” exclaimed the stranger, and added, confidently, “I’ll go along with you part way, if you don’t mind. I’m on my way to Burton’s Landing, five miles below, and the steamboat doesn’t come along for three hours yet. I cannot get a carriage and I don’t want to walk. You don’t mind giving me a lift, do you? That’s a beautiful boat of yours, by the way.”
The man had an air of easy assurance; and, besides, the request was one that any yachtsman would willingly grant.
“Why, certainly,” replied Harvey, “we’ll take you, eh, Henry?”
“Pleased to do it,” responded Henry Burns.
They worked the yacht up alongside the wharf, and the stranger, grasping a stay, swung himself off and leaped down on to the deck. Then he pushed the boat’s head off with a vigorous shove and advanced, smilingly, with hand extended, to greet the boys. The Viking gathered headway and was once more going down-stream.
The stranger was a rather tall, well-built man, light on his feet, and handled himself as though he were no novice aboard a boat. He descended into the cockpit and shook hands with Jack Harvey and Henry Burns.
His voice, as he bade them good afternoon, was singularly full and deep, and seemed to issue almost oddly from behind a heavy, blond moustache. As Henry Burns expressed it afterward, it reminded him of a ventriloquist he had seen once with a travelling show, because the man’s lips seemed hardly to move, and the muscles of his face scarcely changed as he spoke. His eyes, of a clear but cold blue, lighted up, however, in a pleasant way, as he thanked them.
He wore a suit of navy blue, and a yachting-cap on his head.
“This is the greatest luck in the world for me,” he said. “You see, I want to catch the train that will take me down to Bellport, and I can get it at the Landing below. This fine craft of yours will take me – ”
He stopped with strange abruptness. If the attention of Jack Harvey and Henry Burns had, by chance, been directed more closely to him, and less upon the handling of their yacht, they might have observed a surprised and puzzled look come over his face. They might have observed him half-start up from his seat, like a man that had suddenly come, all unwittingly, upon a thing he had not expected to see.
But the two boys, intent upon their sailing, noticed only that the man had left a sentence half-finished. They turned upon him inquiringly.
“What were you going to say?” asked Henry Burns.
The man settled back in his seat, reached a hand calmly into an inner coat-pocket, and drew forth a cigar-case.
“I dare say you don’t smoke,” he said, offering it to them. “No, well, I didn’t think so. You’re a little bit young for that. Let me see, what was I saying? – oh, yes, I was about to remark that this boat would take me down to the Landing on time. She does walk along prettily, and no mistake.”
With which, he lighted the cigar and began puffing enjoyably. But his eyes darted here and there, quickly, sharply, over the boat. Through a cloud of cigar smoke, he was scrutinizing it from one end to the other.
“You handle her well,” he said. “Had her long?”
“Why, no,” replied Harvey. “The fact is, though we have had other boats – that is, I have – and we have handled others, this is our first sail in this one. You see, we got her in an odd way, last season – just at the close of the season, in fact; and she was not in shape for sailing then. So we had to lay her up for the winter. This is really the first trying out we have given her.”
“Indeed, most interesting,” replied the stranger, arising from his seat and advancing toward the cabin bulkhead, where he stood, apparently gazing off across the river. Then, as he returned to his seat again, he added, “That’s rather an elaborate ornamenting of brass around the companionway.”
“Isn’t it, though!” exclaimed Harvey, proudly. “You don’t see them much handsomer than that often, eh?”
“Why, no, now you speak of it,” replied the man. “You don’t, and that’s a fact.
“In fact,” he added, stealing a sidelong glance at the two boys, “it’s the only one just like it that I ever saw.
“Pretty shore along here, isn’t it?” he remarked a few moments later, as they stood in near to where the spruces came down close to the water’s edge, with the ledges showing below. “What’s that you were saying about coming by the boat oddly? She looks to me as though your folks must have paid a good price for her.”
“Why, that’s the odd part of it,” answered Harvey. “The fact is, our folks didn’t pay for her at all. An old lady bought her for us. Made us a present of her. Perhaps you’d like to hear about it.”
“Indeed I should,” replied the stranger. “It will while away the time to the Landing.”
“You tell it, Henry,” said Harvey.
So Henry Burns began, while the stranger stretched his legs out comfortably and listened.
“Well,” said Henry Burns, “this yacht, the Viking, was named the Eagle when we first saw her.”
The stranger’s cigar was almost blazing with the vigour of his smoking.
“She came into the harbour of Southport – that’s on Grand Island, below here, where we are bound – one day last summer, to pick up a guest at the hotel. There were two men aboard her, and it turned out that these two men, and the man they were after at the hotel, had committed a robbery at Benton. That’s way up the river.
“Well, it’s a long story how they were discovered; but they were, and some jewels they had hidden were recovered. I said they were captured – but one, a man named Chambers, got away in this very yacht. But he came back, later, and set fire to the hotel for revenge.
“That was along toward the end of the summer. Then it happened that Jack, here, – Jack Harvey, – captured the man, Chambers, in this yacht, down in a thoroughfare below Grand Island. Jack’s boat, the Surprise, was sunk there, when the two yachts crashed together, bow on.”
“Poor old Surprise!” interrupted Jack Harvey.
“Well, then,” continued Henry Burns, “there is a man over at Southport, Squire Brackett, that hates all us boys, just because he is mean. He told Witham, the hotel proprietor, that he had seen us boys in the hotel basement, shortly before the fire; and he and Witham had us accused of setting it, although everybody in Southport was indignant about it. And all this time, Jack was on the right track, because he had seen the man running from the fire and had followed him over to the other shore of the island, and recognized the boat he sailed away in.
“So Jack sailed down the other side of the island, and captured the man, Chambers, in the thoroughfare; that is, Jack and his crew did. And they brought Chambers back just at the right time – and Squire Brackett and Witham were so ashamed they wanted to go and hide away somewhere.”
The man they had taken aboard looked smilingly at Henry Burns.
“That is certainly a remarkable story,” he said, knocking the ashes carelessly from the end of his cigar.
“Yes, but the rest of it is the oddest part of it,” responded Henry Burns. “There was an old lady named Mrs. Newcome,