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Updated: May 23, 2025
The sail filled, and the boat heeled to the steady breeze; and it was good to hear the ripples wake at the bows, and feel the life come back to her, as it were, after the idle drifting of the last hour. But there was no doubt that the wind was failing us little by little. About sunrise it breezed up again, and cheered us mightily.
"Waal, m' lad, yuh certainly put it all over that maverick," exulted Reddy; "one time there, though, we figgered he had you beaten to a stand-still. It was sure a treat the way yuh breezed past him at the finish, it sure was." "I was worried some myself," admitted Mr. Melton, "but I suppose I ought to have known better." Meanwhile Bert had taken a shower, and started to dress.
The men settled down on the weather side with their pipes and quids, and all through the short summer night we lay there, huddled half asleep together, running to the south like a stag. At dawn the wind breezed up, and the lugger leaped and bounded till I felt giddy; but they shortened no sail, only let her drive and stagger, wasting no ounce of the fair wind.
Who pulled off that stunt on us?" bleated a few of the mystified younger boys, while Stud silently brushed moisture like cave-tears from his forehead. So did the tall Scoutmaster, heavily breathing relief. "Not an aëroplane in sight! Not a single one!" breezed the girls, all ready to be angry. "Who who put that hoax over?" "Varnish right and aëroplane wrong!"
How anxiously we listened to the wind in the rigging! Again it breezed up. A loud clap was heard. I thought one of the masts had gone by the board; but it was the fore-topsail blown to ribbons. What next might follow we could not tell. The very masts began to shake; and it was evident that the fire had begun to burn their heels.
The sun had set in a wrack of wild, storm-riven cloud painted with the hues of fire and smoke, which, louring threateningly, had overspread the sky with incredible rapidity, completely obscuring the light of the stars; the wind, still icy cold, had breezed up again savagely, kicking up a tremendous sea, the spray from which quickly drenched us in the destroyers to the skin, despite our "oilies," sou'-westers, and sea boots; yet the staunch little vessels, though rolling and pitching in the most distracting manner, rode like gulls the seas which, to us, seemed to be literally running "mountains high."
There came three sharp raps at the office door. The tense figures within jumped nervously. "Keep out!" called Jo Haley, "whoever you are." Whereupon the door opened and Birdie Callahan breezed in. "Get out, Birdie Callahan," roared Jo. "You're in the wrong pew." Birdie closed the door behind her composedly and came farther into the room.
But I remembered how I had heard that same tune overhead at night in a gale of wind a fortnight earlier, and I am not ashamed to say that the same sensation came over me now, and I wished myself well out of the Helen B., and aboard of any old cargo-dragger, with a windmill on deck, and an eighty-nine-forty-eighter for captain, and a fresh leak whenever it breezed up.
Robson would have so liked to sit in even a threadbare pomp and receive the homage of her visitors, but fate had been scurvy enough to withhold this scant triumph. Nellie Whitehead breezed in on Saturday afternoon just as Mrs. Finnegan's cuckoo clock cooed the stroke of three; immediately the air began to move out of adversity's tragic current.
At length probably about two o'clock in the morning it breezed up so fiercely, and knocked up such a sea that I dared not run the boat any longer, so, watching my chance, I put the helm down and hove-to on the larboard tack, with the boat's head to the northward, and anxiously awaited the coming of daylight.
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