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He cleft the water noiselessly, and it was not long before he grasped the Barracouta's bobstay and hoisted himself aboard. Dropping down the companionway, he groped forward through the cabin to the little door leading into the bow, and crept in on hands and knees. His fingers found what he wanted, an opening between two planks, where a leak had been freshly calked with oakum.
Everybody took his turn at steering, Jim acting as instructor. "Any one of you may be called on to handle this boat alone some time in the next three months, and you can't begin learning how any too early." Percy's experience with automobiles stood him in good stead. He was naturally interested in machinery, and soon mastered the details of the Barracouta's engine.
"Now shout, Filippo!" Their cries pealed out together. They were heard. An answering hail came back. Soon the puff-puff-puff of the Barracouta's exhaust was driving rivets through the fog. A little later they were on board the sloop, answering the inquiries of Jim and Budge, while the empty pea-pod towed astern. "Your seamanship wasn't bad, Perce," was Jim's judgment.
On the Barracouta's next trip to Matinicus she brought back the balance of Throppy's wireless outfit. It did not take him long to get his plant in working order. Almost every evening thereafter he spent a short time picking up messages from passing steamers and the neighboring islands, and sending others in return.
Percy, in particular, remembering the habits of certain of his friends, took the story to heart. Nobody said anything more until they were inside the cove and running toward the lobster-car. Budge and Throppy saw them coming and rowed out in the pea-pod. While the lobsters were being dipped aboard the smack and weighed, Spurling tinkered the Barracouta's engine.
The most serious feature of the case, so far as a boat voyage was concerned, was that even the biggest of the available boats, which was one of the Barracouta's gigs, was much too small to justify me in the attempt to make the passage to Jamaica in her; for should the breeze happen to pipe strong, the boat could not possibly live in the boisterous sea that would at once be knocked up.
The next morning they landed once more in Sprowl's Cove, and a few hours later they had fallen back into their customary routine, as if smugglers were a thing unknown. The leak in the Barracouta's bow was calked, making her as tight as before. The following day dawned fiery red and it was evident that a fall storm was brewing.
"And they had no brand on their buoys?" "Not a letter!" "That's against the law. Suspicious, too. So they intend to build a camp here and spend the summer?" "That's what they said." The anxious furrows in Jim's forehead deepened. He brought his fist down hard on the Barracouta's cabin. "Boys," he said, firmly, "they can't stop here. There aren't lobsters enough on these ledges for them and for us.
A short pause now ensued, during which I suspected that the first luff was conferring with Captain Stopford, the Barracouta's people gazing curiously at us meanwhile through the brig's open ports; and then the sound of the boatswain's pipe came floating to us from the brig across the tumbling waters, and we heard his gruff voice bellowing "Gigs away!"
He also bought several bushels of salt, as well as two barrels of hake heads to start them in lobstering. The Barracouta's tank was filled with twenty-five gallons of gasolene, and six five-gallon cans were purchased besides. The boat would require about seven gallons a day for ordinary fishing, so this would supply them for more than a week.
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