Smiley's eyes were fixed keenly on him for a moment; then they swept
to the windward pier. He snatched the horn from Roche's hand and blew a
blast.
The sailors up forward heard it, and shouted and waved their arms. A tug
hand, seeing the commotion, though he heard nothing, finally was made
to understand, and Captain Peters slowed his engines. Smiley, meanwhile,
was steering up close to the windward pier.
“Tumble off there, Pete,” he ordered. “Quick, now.”
“What you going to do to me? Ain't goin' to put me off there, are you?”
“Get a move on, or I 'll throw you off. There's no room for you here.”
“Hold on there, Dick; I ain't got no clothes or nothin'. And you owe me
my pay--”
“You 'll have to go to Cap'n Stenzenberger about that. Here, Pink, heave
him off. Quick, now!”
“Don't you lay your hand on me, Pink Harper--”
But the words were lost. The young sailor in the red shirt fairly
pitched him over the rail. The life saver, running alongside, gave him
a hand. Captain Peters was leaning out impatiently from his wheel-house
door, and now at the signal he dove back and hurriedly rang for full
steam ahead; it was no place to run chances. And as the schooner passed
out into the open lake, leaving the lighthouse behind her, and soon
afterward casting off the tug, there was no time to look back at the
raging figure on the pier. Though once, to be sure, Dick had turned with
a laugh and shouted out a few lines of a wild parody on the song of the
day, “Baby Mine.”
The song proved so amusing that, when they were free of the tug and
were careening gayly off to the southwest with all fast on board and
a boiling sea around them, he took it up again. And braced at a sharp
angle with the deck, one eye on the sails, another cast to windward, his
brown hands knotted around the spokes of the wheel, he sang away at the
top of his lungs:--
“He is coming down the Rhine.
With a bellyful of wine,”
Young Harper worked his way aft along the upper rail. His eye fell on
the figure of his captain, and he laughed and nodded.
“Lively goin', Cap'n.”
Lively it certainly was.
“Guess there ain't no doubt about _our_ makin' it!”
“Doubt your uncle!” roared the Captain. And he winked at his young
admirer.
“Guess Mr. Roche didn't like the looks of it.”
“Guess not.”
Harper crept forward again. And Smiley, with a laugh in his eye, squared
his chest to the storm, and thought of the necklace stowed away in the
cabin; and then he thought of her who was to be its owner day after
to-morrow, and “I wonder if we will make it,” thought he; “I wonder!”
And make it they did. Sliding gayly up into a humming southwest wind,
with every rag up and the sheets hauled home, with the bluest of skies
above them and the bluest of water beneath (for the Lakes play at April
weather all around the calendar), Wednesday afternoon found them turning
Grosse Pointe.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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