Fifteen minutes later, the sound of heavy sweeps, labouring and grinding in rowlocks, told them that another boat was coming into the harbour from outside with the aid of an “ash breeze,” the wind having died wholly away. The boat came in close to where they were lying. From their cabin, as they sat eating supper, they could hear a man’s voice, rough and heavy, complaining apparently of the bad luck he had had in getting caught outside, deserted by the breeze. The next moment the young yachtsmen got a rude surprise. The dishes they had set out on the upturned leaves of the centreboard table rattled, and the yacht shook with the shock caused by the other boat clumsily bumping into them astern. Then the rough voice sounded in their ears: “Git away from that mooring! Don’t yer know I have the right ter that? What are yer lyin’ here for?” The yachtsmen rushed out on deck. The boat they saw just astern was a dingy, odd-shaped little sailboat, about twenty-five feet long, sharp at both ends, with the stern queerly perked up into a point like the tail of a duck. A thickly bearded, swarthy man stood at her tiller, where he had been directing, roughly, the efforts of two youths, who had worked the boat in with the sweeps. “What’s the matter with you?” cried Harvey, angrily. “What do you mean by bumping into us? We’ve got our lights up.” “You git off from that mooring, I tell you!” cried the man, fiercely. “Ain’t I had it all summer? What right have you got interfering?” The man’s manner was so threatening and his voice so full of the fury that told of a temper easily aroused, that a less aggressive youth than Harvey might have been daunted. But Harvey had got his bearings and knew where he was. “No, you don’t!” he replied, sharply. “You can’t bully us, so it won’t do you any good to try. This is a government buoy, and the first boat up to it has the right to use it unless the revenue men complain. You can push your old tub out of the way.” “Better tell him we will give him a line astern if he wants it,” suggested Henry Burns. “That won’t do any harm.” “I won’t,” exclaimed Harvey. “He’s taken enough paint off the _Viking_ already, I dare say. But”—he added—“you can if you want to. I don’t care.” So Henry Burns made the offer. The answer the man made was to order the two youths to work the “pinkey,” as the fishermen call his style of craft, up to the buoy, where he could cut the yachtsmen adrift. Harvey sprang to the bow of the _Viking_, drew her up close to the buoy by taking in on the slack of the rope, and held her there by a few turns. Then he snatched up the boat hook. Henry Burns and Tom and Bob likewise armed themselves with the sweeps of the _Viking_ and a piece of spar. They stood ready to repel an attack.