“I was in the same little old dive where I’d bought the butter. The old codger looked at me sort of suspicious and I made believe I’d come back on purpose. He wanted to know if I’d found my boat and I told him yes. Then I asked if he had any crackers and cheese. He had crackers but his cheese was all gone, he said. So I bought a nickel’s worth of crackers—stale old things they were, too—and a box of sardines. I’ll bet those sardines had been there ten years! But I ate them. Wish I hadn’t. I asked the man how to get to the steamboat wharf and he tried to tell me. Said if I started out from where my boat was and kept a little north of east I’d get there. I asked a fellow outside a place where they sold oilskins and he said about the same thing. So I hunted up my boat, starting from the back door of the grocery, you know, and found it all right. Then——”
“Maybe you pull on one oar harder than the other, Tommy,” suggested Dan. “Do you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I do. I suppose that would account for my getting back to that old grocery shop. Well, off I went again. And you can bet that by that time my arms were aching!” Tom rubbed and stretched them now as though in proof of the assertion. “I rowed about ten minutes, I guess, and came to a beach. Well, that was a new one to me. I didn’t know where the dickens I was, and I don’t yet.”
“I do,” said Bob, who had spread the chart out on the corner of the table. “You were here somewhere.”
“That’s right,” said Tom, looking over his shoulder, “because I jumped out, pulled the boat up and looked around. And on the other side of the road was a marshy place and a lot more water all along. I didn’t know which way the road would take me, so I went back and pushed off again. By that time those sardines had begun to swim around inside of me and I got kind of squirmy. After a minute I heard a whistle and I thought it was the _Vagabond’s_. I listened and it sounded five times. Then, after a while, it sounded five again.”
“Yes,” said Nelson; “one, two—one, two, three; twenty-three for you, Tommy.”
“Was that it? It sounded to me like T, o,—m, m, y! T, o,—m, m, y! Anyhow, I started out for it but it was hard to tell just where it was. And after I’d been pulling about ten minutes or so I had to quit. The—the sardines weren’t satisfied where they were. I was as sick as a dog for a while, and afterward I laid down in the bottom of the boat and didn’t care whether I ever found you fellows or not. Every now and then I’d hear the whistle. And then I went to sleep. When I woke up I was stiff and the water was just running off me. I was sure then that the tide had taken me out to sea and I was scared blue. So I turned the boat right around and rowed in the opposite direction. After a bit I heard oars and shouted out. A man answered and I asked him where the steamboat wharf was. ‘Over there about two or three hundred feet,’ said he. But I couldn’t see, him and I didn’t know where ‘over there’ was. So I asked him to wait until I reached him. He was a young fellow in a fishing dory filled with lobster pots. I told him I was looking for the _Vagabond_ and he said he’d just passed her and that if I’d follow him he’d show her to me. So I did. And we went about thirty or forty strokes, I guess, and found her. And here I am. And if any one wants to go for a row the boat’s out there. I’m going to stay right here until the fog goes away. Is there any more tea, Bob?”