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The room, whose door was opened by the lady's maid, was the library, containing three cumbrous cases of books, and several portraits in oil, with deep, gilded frames, a map of Virginia and its northeastern environs, including all the peninsula south of the Choptank river and Cape Henlopen; and near the door was a tall clock, that a giant might stand in, solemnly cogging and waving time, and giving the monotony of everlasting evening to the place, which was increased by the flickering fire of wood on the tall brass fire-irons, before which some high-backed, wide, comfortable leather chairs were drawn, all worn to luxurious attitudes, as if each had been the skin of Judge Custis and his companions, recently evacuated.
Someone had turned the boat loose, idled down to its lowest speed. The stable crab boat had continued on course, heading out the mouth of the Little Choptank into the wide bay. Only a bloodstain showed that there had been violence aboard. The flying stingaree had claimed another victim! Steve Waits It Out
Ask your grandfather where Calvert's Favor is located, will you?" The boy came out of the store and walked toward the car. He was a freckle-faced towhead, with a grin wider than the Choptank River. "Heck, Steve, I don't have to ask gran'pop that. Everybody knows where Calvert's Favor is located." "Not everybody," Steve returned. "I don't. How about letting us in on the secret, Jimmy?"
On December 19th they met at West River with courtesy and kindness; but after three days they concluded to wait for the more propitious weather of the coming year. Penn, on his way back, attended a religious meeting at a private house, and afterward an official meeting at Choptank, on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake, and reached Chester again by December 29th, where much business engaged him.
"'The name Choptank comes from the Choptank Indians who lived in the area until the middle of the nineteenth century. These Indians were first discovered by Captain John Smith when he sailed into Chesapeake Bay in search of a location for what later became the Jamestown Colony." "We're sailing through history," Scotty commented. "And we'd better step on it." He pushed the throttles forward.
Scotty swung around the northern tip of land that marked the mouth of the Little Choptank. "We won't make it," he said, glancing at the chart. Rick nodded. "But the wind will be behind us. We can drive right into the mouth of the nearest creek. According to the chart, there's a cove just inside the mouth where we ought to be out of the wind."
Meanwhile the steamer was taking Vesta and her husband across the Chesapeake Bay in the night that greatest, gentlest indentation in the coast of the United States; at once river and sound, fiord and sea, smooth as the mill-pond, and full of life as the nutritious milk of the mother, and on whose breast a brood of rivers lay and suckled without rivalry the long Susquehanna, James, and Potomac; the short, thick Choptank, Chester, and Patapsco; and, to the flying wild-swan, its arborage looked like a vast pine-tree, with boughs of snow, climbing two hundred miles from its roots in the land of corn and cotton into the golden cloud of Northern grain and hay.
Rick touched Scotty's side and forged ahead, heading straight out. He counted his kicks, estimating distance covered. When he reached a count of three hundred he angled right, toward the north shore of the Little Choptank. They were well out of the creek now.
As they began the crossing of the Little Choptank River, Steve gave them instructions. "When we get opposite the creek mouth, the engine is going to stutter and kick up a lot of smoke. The boat will drift into the smoke and out again. You'll have a few seconds to go over. I'll pretend to work on the motor, and finally get it started, but running rough.
He even crossed to the eastern shore of the Chesapeake to visit a Quaker meeting on the Choptank before winter set in, and he describes the immense migration of wild pigeons at that season, and the ducks which flew so low and were so tame that the colonists knocked them down with sticks.
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