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The high bow prevents the shipping of too much water, but will also offer resistance to the wind and so impede the progress of the boat. A medium high bow is the best. One firm of camp-outfitters advertises a canoe called the Sponson, the name being taken from the air-chambers built along the outside rail, which are called sponsons.
It was not easy to do so. He held on to his man to the very last, crying out: "Leave me alone till I do for him. Man alive, don't you know the villain wants to murder me?" The desperado lay for a while gulping and gasping on his bed of glory, unable to rise. I observed patches of bloody skin hanging loose on both sides of his neck when he staggered along the deck towards the starboard sponson.
"Yes," went on the old sailor, "my friend, Commander Sponson, of the Coastguard, writes to me to say that one of the new ironclads is going out of harbour next week on her trial trip; and, if you like, you shall have a chance of seeing what sort of vessel a modern ship of war is." "Oh thank you, Captain Dresser, that will be jolly!" said Bob, his face colouring up with pleasure.
Gladys Orchil, passing her, saw Selwyn at the same moment, and her clear, ringing salute and slender arm aloft, arrested his attention; and the next moment they were off together, swimming toward the sponson canoe which Gerald had just launched with the assistance of Sandon Craig and Scott Innis. For a moment Eileen stood there, motionless.
"By the way," said the Captain to the latter, on taking his leave in the evening after escorting them back to "the Moorings," "you mustn't forget the trial of the Archimedes to-morrow, my boy. Captain Sponson told me the other day at the Club that she'd go out of harbour at nine o'clock sharp in the morning!" "Oh, I'll remember," replied Bob. "Where will she start from, Captain?"
The next morning she continued her course, and had run on with a brisk breeze for some hours, when Ben shouted out "That's the bay, sir, where Dick Sponson and I, when we had Batten with us, found the Sally Rose, after he had escaped from the Indians; it is three days' pull, in a heavy boat with the wind against us, to the northward of this, where we took Batten on board.
There was method in his motions, for when he would cease, the small red-and-white flag on the cruiser's bridge would answer, waving to the right and left, and up and down. A secondary gun spoke from a midship sponson, and Captain Bacon exclaimed enthusiastically, "Salutin' the flag," and again dipped his ensign.
Though my knowledge was all by touch as, for example, when Pyecroft led my surrendered hand to the base of some bulging sponson, or when my palm closed on the knife-edge of the stem and patted it timidly yet I felt lonely and unprotected as the enormous, helpless ship was withdrawn, and we drifted away into the void where voices sang: Tom Pearce, Tom Pearce, lend me thy gray mare, All along, out along, down along lea!
And after that bit of insolence the Cap'n was indignantly silent. The cutter jingled her full-speed bell while the tackle was still lifting the sponson boat. "They're ugly, and are hiding something," called the man of the faded cap, swinging up the bridge-ladder. "No good to pump more lies out of them.
He and Gerald usually challenged the rollers in a sponson canoe when Gerald was there for the week-end; or, when Lansing came down, the two took long swims seaward or cruised about in Gerald's dory, clad in their swimming-suits; and Selwyn's youth became renewed in a manner almost ridiculous, so that the fine lines which had threatened the corners of his mouth and eyes disappeared, and the clear sun tan of the tropics, which had never wholly faded, came back over a smooth skin as clear as a boy's, though not as smoothly rounded.
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