He watched her anxiously, quick to approve her merits as she displayed them. He had sailed small craft before--frail center-board cat-boats, handy and swift, built to serve in summer winds and protected waters: never such an one as this. Yet he liked her.
Deep bosomed she was, with no center-board, dependent on her draught and heavy keel to hold her on the wind; stanch and seaworthy, sheathed with stout plank and ribbed with seasoned timber, designed to keep afloat in the wickedest weather brewed by the foul-tempered German Ocean. Withal her lines were fine and clean; for all her beam she was calculated to nose narrowly into the wind and make a pretty pace as well. A good boat: he had the grace to give the credit to his luck.
Her disposition was more fully disclosed as they drew away from the beach. Inshore with shoaling water, the waves had been choppy and spiteful but lacking force of weight. Farther out, as the bottom fell away, the rollers became more uniform and powerful; heavy sweeping seas met the cat-boat, from their hollows looming mountainous to the man in the tiny cockpit; who was nevertheless aware that to a steamer they would be negligible.
His boat breasted them gallantly, toiling sturdily up the steep acclivities, poising breathlessly on foam-crested summits for dizzy instants, then plunging headlong down the deep green swales; and left a boiling wake behind her,--urging ever onward, hugging the wind in her wisp of blood-red sail, and boring into it, pulling at the tiller with the mettle of a race-horse slugging at the bit.
Offshore, too, the wind stormed with added strength, or, possibly, had freshened. For minutes on end the leeward gunwales would run green, and now and again the screaming, pelting squalls that scoured the estuary would heel her over until the water cascaded in over the lee combing, and the rudder, lifted clear, would hang idle until, smitten by some racing billow, the tiller would be all but torn from Kirkwood's hands. Again and again this happened; and those were times of trembling. But always the cat-boat righted, shaking the clinging waters from her and swinging her stem into the wind again; and there would follow an abbreviated breathing spell, during which Kirkwood was at liberty to dash the salt spray from his eyes and search the wind-harried waste for the brigantine. Sometimes he found her, sometimes not.