CHAPTER III

THE KISMET STARTS ON HER VOYAGE

‘Shove her off there!’

The captain of the launch _Kismet_ gave the order in a fine, gruff, sailor-like voice as he pulled the throttle a trifle wider. The deck-hand, seated on the edge of the scanty after deck, set two bare feet against the float and pushed hard. The mate gripped the wheel tightly, fixed anxious blue eyes on the stern of a lumber schooner fully ten fathoms away and hoped for the best. The launch’s nose swung slowly into the stream, the captain pulled back on the clutch lever and there ensued a clattering, jarring noise that caused the deck-hand very nearly to lose his balance and go overboard. Then the alarming sounds ceased and the _Kismet_ lurched forward. The mate saw, with vast relief, that a collision with the schooner was averted――by the narrow margin of some forty feet――and dared a backward look at the dock where his father and Pud’s father and bow-legged Andy Tremble were gathered to see them off. They were waving and calling, and Tim waved and shouted back. So did Pud. Harmon only showed a flash of white teeth. There was no one there to say good-bye to Harmon, but he didn’t seem to mind. The launch straightened out in the middle of the river and pointed her bow for the bridge. The figures on the boat-yard float receded and were presently lost to sight. Captain and mate exchanged a look of triumph. The voyage had begun!

Presently there ensued an anxious period when, the little two-cylinder engine throttled down and Pud and Tim both at the wheel, the _Kismet_ negotiated the passage under the long bridge. The space looked alarmingly narrow as they approached, but once in the shadows of the ancient timbers there was room and to spare on each side, and almost nonchalantly Pud opened her up again. As they passed again into the sunlight Gus Miller’s station jitney rattled across and Gus waved down to them. Pud returned the salutation with all the dignity of the captain of an ocean liner waving from her bridge. The railroad station went slowly astern and a long line of box cars on the siding followed. The water tower on Coop’s Hill was all that remained in view of Millville now. On their left a red clay bank arose to the edge of the meadows. On their right trees and bushes marched straight down to the gently flowing water. Pud gave a sigh of great contentment.

‘Some little craft, Tim,’ he said.

‘Sure is,’ agreed Tim. ‘Say, it ain’t hard to steer, is it, when you get used to it?’

‘N-no, not here,’ answered Pud, ‘but you wait till she gets in a sea!’

‘How do you mean sea?’ asked Tim anxiously. ‘Where are we going to get in any sea?’

‘Well, I guess this old river can kick up pretty mean lower down,’ said Pud. ‘Take it around Mumford, Tim, and it’s ’most a mile wide.’

‘Mumford! Gosh, we ain’t going that far. Why Mumford’s forty miles, pretty near, by river.’

‘What of it? This old cruiser’s doing five miles right now, I guess, and it would only take us eight hours to get to Mumford, wouldn’t it? Why, we could get as far as that to-day if we wanted to!’

‘Well, but you said we were going to just cruise and take it easy. You said we’d go up Fox River a way and explore. You didn’t say anything about Mumford, and I’ll tell you right now I ain’t going to take any chances!’

‘Pshaw, who’s asking you to? Why, this boat’s a mighty safe old craft, I tell you. I guess I wouldn’t be afraid to go right out into the sound in her.’

‘Well, you can go alone,’ answered Tim decidedly. ‘When you get ready to do that, just you dump me and Harmon ashore.’

‘I’ll bet Harmon wouldn’t be scared to go, would you, Harmon?’

‘Where’s ’at?’ asked the darky, who, since leaving the float, had been watching the engine in grave fascination.

‘Out in the sound. You wouldn’t be afraid, would you?’

‘What kind o’ sound?’

‘Why, the ocean down at the mouth of the river.’

‘I ain’ never heerd no sound yet I’s scared of,’ replied Harmon calmly.

Tim laughed. Pud, about to make the matter clear, was interrupted by a sudden grinding and thumping from aft the engine and hurried off. When you put the clutch lever back on the _Kismet_, you had to engage it with a little wire hook or else it slipped back into neutral. Pud knew this, but in the excitement of getting away had forgotten it. Now he remedied the matter and returned to the bow, but not to the recent subject of discourse. A man fishing from a flat-bottomed punt just ahead and a few yards from the shore claimed his interest. To see if the man had had any luck, Pud turned the launch toward the punt.

‘Catching anything?’ he called as the _Kismet_ waddled past a few yards distant.

A red and irate countenance turned toward them and the disciple of Izaak Walton gestured fiercely with the hand that wasn’t busy with his pole. ‘You consarned whippersnappers,’ he yelled, ‘ain’t you got no sense at all? What do you mean acomin’ over here and scarin’ all the fish away? If I had ahold of you a minute I’d teach you some sense, you dog-gone, low-down trash! I’d show you who was catchin’ anythin’! I’d plumb wear you out, dod-bust you! I’d――’

The _Kismet_ passed from hearing, but back up the stream the angry gentleman still shook his fist at them. Pud and Tim looked a bit chastened, but the usually solemn Harmon was doubled over with mirth.

‘Yeah, yeah!’ he gurgled. ‘Old Mister Man certainly was talkin’ fine! Lawsy, lawsy! My golly, wan’t he angrified?’

‘Huh,’ said Pud, ‘I don’t believe he ever caught anything there, anyway, the old grouch!’

After a minute Tim asked wistfully: ‘Where do we stop for dinner, Pud?’

‘Dinner? Gee, it’s only a little after ten! Didn’t you eat any breakfast?’

‘Not much,’ acknowledged Tim. ‘I guess I was too excited.’

‘Hm, well, I guess I was, too. Just the same, we hadn’t ought to have dinner before twelve; or, maybe, half-past eleven.’

‘N-no, but thinking about it sort of helps,’ murmured Tim.

It got pretty warm on the river as the sun moved toward the zenith and both Pud and Tim began to look longingly at the occasional shady places they passed. Harmon lay flat on his back on the stern seat, one bare black arm across his eyes, utterly motionless, silent and contented. They chugged past Farquhar’s Landing with its half-dozen scattered houses and gazed back regretfully at the broad oaks that lined the single street. Ahead of them lay a long stretch of open stream, sun-smitten, its banks barren of shade. Pud consulted his silver watch and announced casually: ‘’Most quarter-past eleven. Guess we might as well stop at the next place that looks good, Tim. Won’t do to overheat the engine.’

‘What about me getting overheated?’ grumbled Tim. ‘Anyway, there isn’t any place in sight, and by the time we get to one, I’ll be fried as hard as an egg.’

‘I guess it isn’t any hotter for you than it is for me,’ said Pud. ‘Looks like there were trees down beyond that bend, don’t it?’

Tim agreed that it did sort of look that way, and a quarter of an hour later the _Kismet_ sidled up to the shore at the right where a straggling grove of trees had taken possession of one corner of a field. Although the launch drew only about eighteen inches, they couldn’t get her nose close enough to land dry-shod, and so Harmon waded ashore with the bowline and made it fast to the bole of a willow. Then he pushed a log out toward the launch and Tim got ashore on it without wetting more than one foot slightly. It was decided to be much too hot to do any cooking, so Pud selected a box of crackers, a can of potted ham, six bananas, and three bottles of lemon tonic from the larder and carefully tossed the articles one by one across the intervening space of mud and water to Tim. Everything got over safely except one of the bottles, and Harmon rescued that. Having turned off the gasoline at the tank according to instructions from Andy Tremble, Pud set out to join the others. Perhaps the current had slightly misplaced the log. Anyhow, Pud felt the water creeping about one ankle, gave a startled exclamation and advanced his other foot hurriedly with the result that he stepped on the side of the log and――Oh, well, what finally happened was that Pud sat squarely down in three inches of water!

To his credit it is here related that he didn’t get angry. After an instant of surprise and dismay, he accepted the misadventure as an excellent joke and laughed so hard that it required aid from the grinning Tim to get him to his feet. Harmon was rolling about on the ground, convulsed with joy. Laughter cleared the atmosphere considerably. The heat on the river had commenced to make both Pud and Tim somewhat testy. Pud ate his lunch with no more on than his underclothes. The costume was sufficient for the occasion, and Tim envied him until the mosquitoes learned of their arrival and kept Pud so busy slapping that he scarcely had time to eat. Things tasted pretty good, although the tonic would have been more satisfying if it hadn’t been rather more than lukewarm. When the none too hearty repast was finished to the last crumb, Harmon was dispatched first to the launch for the lard-pail that was to do duty as a water bucket and then up the hill in the hot noonday sunshine in search of a well or a spring. The river water was too warm to drink. When Harmon had uncomplainingly departed, the others provided themselves with branches with which to fight the mosquitoes and made themselves comfortable. A few yards away the launch rubbed her sides against a snag and looked, as Pud proudly observed, ‘pretty good.’

The _Kismet_ was twenty-and-a-half feet long and six feet wide, proportions that made less for speed than comfort and safety. She was open all the way from her short forward deck to her even shorter after deck. The engine was placed amidship. A seat extended across the stern and along either side. Two folding canvas stools were also provided. The seats had lockers under them, and there was a locker beneath the stern decking and a space at the bow pretty much taken up by the gasoline tank. The _Kismet_ had been painted buff to the water-line and white above it, but the white had long since turned to drab. There hadn’t been time to repaint the launch, even had Mr. Pringle decided to go to the expense. All that Andy Tremble, in whose boat-yard the _Kismet_ had lain since the previous fall, had been able to do was use a scrubbing brush on the paint and varnish and overhaul the engine. The latter badly needed a coat of enamel, but in lieu of that Andy had doused it well with cylinder oil, and for quite three days it looked fairly decent. After that it went back to its former hues of rusty red and yellow.

The lockers were all filled to capacity, for both Pud and Tim had found it necessary to take along a great many things not usually considered essential to such a voyage. Harmon alone had arrived in light marching order, his effects consisting principally of a blue cotton shirt and a mouth-organ. Mrs. Pringle had censored the boys’ list of rations with a stern hand, and when she had finished Pud had voiced the dismal prophecy that he and Tim――not to mention Harmon――would undoubtedly starve to death long before the week was up. Mrs. Pringle had supplied the larder with essentials only, although at the last moment she had consented to two dozen bottles of tonic and had added a cake of her own baking. Pud had supplied a dozen bananas and Tim had thoughtfully bought five bars of chocolate not too generously studded with almonds. Mr. Pringle had dug out his camping outfit in the garret: an ‘A’ tent, slightly mildewed but whole, two folding canvas cots, a folding stove, an aluminum cooking-kit, and a carbide lantern, and Mrs. Pringle had provided blankets, towels, a great deal more soap than Pud considered necessary, several tin plates and cups and various other impedimenta. Pud and Tim had each taken a change of clothes, swimming trunks, a sweater, and a rubber coat; and at the last moment Tim had scurried home to get a gray flannel shirt!

Both boys had taken a wealth of fishing paraphernalia, including a can of worms; Pud had put in his camera; Tim had bought a baseball and catcher’s mitten; Pud had provided an ancient musket that had lain in the attic for many years and hadn’t been used for nearly a century; Tim had fetched almost a complete set of tools selected from his father’s discarded implements; and there were numerous other items besides, many of which never emerged from the lockers until the _Kismet_ was back in her home port. One of such was an automobile horn that Tim had traded for with Lee Stiles, Egbert Stiles’s cousin. It made a perfectly glorious howl when you punched down on it, and Tim thought it would be a fine thing to mount it on the launch’s bow and blow it when they met other boats, but he forgot all about it afterward.

All these things severely taxed the capacity of the storage space. In fact, the tent and the cots and the cooking-utensils, which lived in a canvas bag when not in use, had to lie in the forward compartment and were forever being stumbled over. So, too, with the box of tonic and a peck of potatoes in a paper sack, neither of which would accommodate themselves to a locker. After the first rain the potatoes burst the sack and it became one of Harmon’s daily duties to rout them out from unexpected places and herd them together again. There was, also, a boat-hook which seemed to have no real home and which was always lying on the floor where you could easiest put an unwary foot on it. After Pud and Tim had each narrowly escaped broken limbs as a result of stepping on the pesky thing and Pud had exasperatedly threatened to heave it overboard, Harmon cleverly solved the difficulty by tying a line to it and dropping it over the side. There were times when they might have made use of it if it had been handy, but it wasn’t and they got on very nicely without it.

I think that’s all the description the _Kismet_ merits. Perhaps I should add that an empty flagpole leaned rakishly from a brass socket at the stern and that the boat’s name, done in black letters, could still be plainly read on each side of the bow. So much, then, for the craft, and now let us return to the crew.