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Updated: June 16, 2025
"Besides," she said, with a shudder, "it's all slate color, like a porpoise, and it looks as wet as a sheet of india-rubber in a dissecting-room." The day before I was to set sail with my auks in a cat-boat bound for Port-of-Waves, Halyard trundled up to me in his chair and announced his intention of going with me. "Going where?" I asked.
I ran through this, and came out on a rough ledge of rocks, which ended in a little beach. I had come to the shore on the other side of the island. Here was a small bay, not more than a hundred yards in width. Sailing slowly out of this bay was a cat-boat, with a skull and cross-bones pirate-flag at the mast-head. It was the "Hoppergrass"! "Hi! Captain Bannister!" I shouted, "hi!"
Even the most abandoned fisherman requires a bite now and then; but my fishing for Fannings had not yet brought me one single nibble and I gave up the sad sport for a while. The beautiful weather took me out of doors over the land, and also over the water, for I am a great lover of sailing; and I found a little cat-boat and a little negro, both of which suited me very well.
The reason for this avoidance of each other at their respective rural residences may be briefly stated. Mr. Buller's country house was situated by the sea, and he was very fond of the water. He had a good cat-boat, which he sailed himself with much judgment and skill, and it was his greatest pleasure to take his friends and visitors upon little excursions on the bay. But Mr.
Phoebus had paddled for the opposite shore of the river to prevent the object of his quest escaping up the Northwest Fork, yet to be in its path if it beat up the main fork, and, by a piece of instinctive calculation, he had run nearly under the cat-boat bows. "Ahoy, there!" cried Jimmy, standing up in his tipsy little skiff; "ahoy the Ellenory Dennis! I'm a-comin' aboard."
"Tobogganing is a little out of season," said his niece, laughing heartily. Mr. Cooke brushed himself off, picked up the glasses which he had dropped in his flight and pushed them into my hands. Then he pointed lakeward with bulging eyes. "Crocker, old man," he said in a loud whisper, "they tell me that is an Asquith cat-boat."
Seth Pond had stolen out to the cat-boat on some errand of his own which nobody questioned, and now there suddenly resounded the surprising notes of his violin. It was very pretty to hear his familiar old tunes over the water, and everybody respected Seth's amiable desire to afford entertainment, even if he failed a little now and then in time or tone.
In time the dory lay alongside the cat-boat, the fisherman with a gnarled hand grasping the latter's gunwale to hold the two together. With some difficulty Kirkwood transhipped himself, landing asprawl in the cockpit, amid a tangle of cordage slippery with scales. The skipper followed, with clumsy expertness bringing the dory's painter with him and hitching it to a ring-bolt abaft the rudder-head.
"Do you think I am going to be left out of this?" returned the colonel. "Not for a minute!" Following the colonel's directions, the boys went down to the landing where they found the Scout, a 25-foot cat-boat, moored. Jumping on board they made ready to cast her loose, took the stops off the sail and had it partly hoisted when the colonel came along bringing with him a gun.
The cat-boat pivoted on her heel; with a crack her sail flapped full and rigid; then, with the untempered might of the wind behind her, she shot like an arrow under the brigantine's bows, so close that the bowsprit of the latter first threatened to impale the sail, next, the bows plunging, crashed down a bare two feet behind the cat-boat's stern.
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