The Camp Fire Girls On A Yacht

BY
MARGARET LOVE SANDERSON

Frontispiece by
MAUDE MARTIN EVERS

The Reilly & Lee Co.
Chicago

Copyright, 1920
by
The Reilly & Lee Co.
Made in U. S. A.

The Camp Fire Girls on a Yacht

CONTENTS

The Camp Fire Girls On a Yacht

CHAPTER I
AN INVITATION FOR A CRUISE

“Oh! Jack, Ellen, come here this instant!” cried Jane Pellew in so excited a manner that the mail rider almost fell out of his jumper in his effort to see what it was that made Miss Jane “take on so.” She was dancing around the broad old veranda waving one of the letters he had just handed her.

“Too hot, Sis, and we are too comfortable,” came Jack’s lazy voice from under the big ash tree that shaded one side of the porch.

“You have enough energy for all of us, so s’pose you come to us,” Ellen called.

“You won’t be hot for long, but you are going to be very uncomfortable in a minute.” With the warning, Jane jumped off the porch and landed in Ellen’s lap, then pulled herself up quickly by means of one hand entwined in Jack’s thick chestnut hair.

“Shut up and listen!” commanded Jane.

“Nobody has a chance to do anything else with you around,” Jack reminded his sister.

“Who could do anything else but listen after having a hundred and thirty pounds of buoyant young Kentucky girl hurled on top of you from a distance of some ten feet? I don’t believe I shall ever get my breath again,” groaned Ellen.

“I’ll say you manage pretty well without it,” Jane laughed. “But, as I was saying, listen and you will hear the most wonderful piece of news that has happened in the history of mankind,” and she started reading from the letter she had still managed to keep in her hand:

“Dearest Jane:”

“Bet it is from one of the Camp Fire Girls,” interrupted her brother.

“Keep quiet, I have a good mind not to tell you after all. But I am such a nice girl I suppose I’ll have to. It’s from Mabel Wing. Now, let me finish,” pleaded Jane.

“Dearest Jane:

“As long as Ellen Birch is staying with you, read this to her, as I am so busy I’ll never have time to write two letters saying exactly the same thing. I am sending one to Ruth Garnier with the request that she read hers to Frances Bliss, who is staying at her home.

“And telegraph me whether you will or won’t, but please do. I always do things backwards even in letters. What I mean is Daddy is going to give me a cruise on his yacht and I want you and Ellen and Jack to come. We will leave City Island, N. Y., July the first, and go till we get bored, up to the Maine coast and poke around all those little islands that Daddy says grow in the New England waters.

“Don’t bring any clothes, as there never is any place to stow more than the bare essentials. And make Jack bring his banjo and, of course, your bathing suits and Camp Fire clothes.

“I’ll be so disappointed I’ll die if you don’t.

Hastily,

“Mabel.”

“As if you couldn’t tell it was ‘hastily, Mabel,’” Jack laughed. “But I have no idea of bringing your bathing suits and Camp Fire regalia.”

“Goose! That is just the Mabel of it. She writes just as she talks,” explained his sister.

“What fun for all of us! But we must telegraph right away,” said the practical Ellen.

“Here comes Father now,” and Jane pointed to a red-wheeled buggy and a briskly trotting bay horse driven up the shady approach to the Pellews’ home by the master of the house.

The three of them ran across to meet Mr. Pellew, a man beloved by his children’s friends as much as he was respected and loved by his own.

“Daddy dear, Mabel wants—” began Jane.

“It will be wonderful!” put in Ellen.

“Is it all right with you if I go too, Dad?” Jack interrupted both girls.

Mr. Pellew put his hands up to his ears and screamed above the hubbub: “How can I tell whether it will be wonderful for Ellen and all right for you or even what Mabel wants if the bunch of you try to rival the builders of the tower of Babel?”

“Ellen,” suggested Jack, “you tell him; Jane gets too excited.”

Ellen put one hand over Jane’s mouth and told Mr. Pellew of the interesting trip Mabel and her father had planned for them.

Squirming away from Ellen, Jane flung her arms around her father’s neck and said, “But we don’t like leaving you when we have been home from school for only such a short while.”

“It never seems to enter your scatter-brained heads that I might oppose you in anything,” Mr. Pellew smiled at his daughter.

“You always are keen for us to have a good time,” Jack explained.

“And you went and had such clever good children that they know just exactly what to do and what is good for them and what is bad for them,” added Jane.

“Of course you can go and I’ll be mighty glad for my children to have such a wonderful summer. When do you expect to leave and from what point?” inquired Mr. Pellew.

“First of July, City Island!” came in chorus from the three.

“Henceforth all my conversation will be nautical. Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of two per cent substitute. Jack, do you have to have a horn or a pipe for stage property when you want to execute a briny jig?” and Jane began to cavort around in what she considered a truly seafaring manner.

“‘Shiver my timbers!’ and ‘Scuttle her amidships!’ is my contribution to this, but I am the only person to be allowed to use these choice phrases until some one can think up better ones. Then, of course, I’ll be glad to cash in my old ones for the new ones,” was Ellen’s generous offer.

“Son, you had better order some horses saddled directly after dinner so you kids can ride over and send the necessary telegrams,” said Mr. Pellew to Jack.

With an “Aye, aye, sir,” Jack raced toward the stable.

“Home is so beautiful in the summer that I can hardly bear to leave it,” sighed Jane.

She and her father and Ellen were walking over the close-cut grass and she cast a rather wistful eye around the lovely lawn that stretched before the Pellew house. There were great trees whose spreading branches had shaded her grandparents, her own father and the mother she couldn’t remember, but loved because of the sweet pictures her father had of her. Where the lawn stopped the rolling fields of blue grass began and Jane could see the old mare, on which she and Jack had learned to ride, grazing contentedly. It was a hobby of her father’s never to sell the old horses on the place but to treat them as worthy old pensioners and turn them out on the rich bluegrass pasture lands that bordered his place. Mr. Pellew had a string of race horses famous throughout Kentucky, and as Jane put it, she and Jack had “fallen from the cradle into a saddle.” Their father kept a model stable and Aunt Min, who took charge of the Pellew home, often complained that the expense of upkeep for the stable was far greater than that of their exceedingly well run home.

“Well, of course, I won’t force you to go,” teased her father.

“Why, Jane, I thought you were perfectly wild to go,” Ellen said.

“Oh, that is the way I always behave about leaving home. I am terribly sentimental over it and always indulge in dramatics when I go away. You see, I am bats about all the horses and dogs on the place and I can’t help thinking about Atta Boy, the Denmark colt Dad was letting me break for my own,” Jane explained. “All the work I have put in on him will come to nothing if he isn’t ridden regularly this summer, and Daddy doesn’t have time to do it for me and I wouldn’t trust anybody else with such a peach of a colt.”

“You honor me, daughter.” Mr. Pellew made a low mocking bow. “To show my deep appreciation of the fact that you put my horsemanship on the level with your own, I suppose I will have to promise to ride Atta Boy every other day for you.”

“I love Kentucky too, Jane, and you can’t know how much it has meant to me to stay with you. Last summer it was too wonderful with the other girls here but this summer it has been just splendid with you and Jack.” Ellen blushed after mentioning Jack, because he had just been telling her what a wonderful summer it was for him with her visiting Jane.

“Ellen, did you ever hear this little tribute to our state?” Mr. Pellew asked and began:

“And the more days you spend in Kentucky the luckier you are,” stated Jane. “But goodness, I sound like that girl from Virginia who was at Hillside last year.”

Aunt Min came out on the porch and interrupted the eulogy on the charms of Kentucky by telling them that dinner was ready. But anyone seeing the great platter of fried chicken on the table before Aunt Min would have said that the eulogy might well have been continued in the spacious old dining room.

CHAPTER II
SERGEANT MURPHY ASSISTS

“Jack! have you your banjo? And Ellen, have you the box of candy Daddy gave us?” Jane called over her shoulder to the two who were sitting in the tonneau as they were driving over to the station to catch the train that was to take them to New York.

“You better keep your eyes on the road if you are to keep us in the road,” gently reproved Mr. Pellew from his seat beside his daughter.

“We’ve got everything we ought to have, but what have you remembered? Nothing for a change?” teased Jack, for Jane was an almost proverbial forgetter.

“Anything important that you have forgotten I can parcel post to you after I come back from New York,” said Aunt Min, who was to go along to chaperon them at the hotel in New York. The girls had some shopping to do and were going up a few days prior to their final departure to accomplish it.

“Aunt Min, you are a perfect peach, and I am so glad you finally joined the Camp Fire Girls.” Ellen reached over and patted affectionately the hand of the woman once disliked by the entire band of Jane’s friends and now the pet of all of them.

As the car, piloted by Jane, whirled up to the station, a rather fat young man was seen dashing frantically around, talking first to the station agent and then to the baggage man, all the time violently mopping his face with a huge white handkerchief.

“There’s Charlie Preston in a stew as usual,” giggled Jane, pointing to the distraught young man, who was Mabel’s fiancé.

Suddenly Charlie stopped his gyrations and his face broke into a really charming smile.

“I was trying to find out from some of these misguided officials if you all had made arrangements to go on this train, for if you weren’t, I wasn’t either, but not one word could I get out of them but a polite ‘Speak to you after the train leaves,’ and, saving your presence, Miss Min, how the deuce would that help me?” Charlie exploded to his friends. He was a strange mixture of calmness in times of stress and great irritability and excitability in times of petty trials.

“All aboa’d!” cried the white-jacketed and very black porter.

“Oh! Daddy, good-bye, good-bye, I am going to miss you all the time, no matter how much fun I am having,” and Jane ruffled Mr. Pellew’s collar in the last of a series of bear hugs that had begun the night before.

“Don’t make such rash promises but write me occasionally, and Jack, you telegraph me as soon as you get to New York. I hope the rooms I wired for will be all right. And now I am going because I won’t feel so alone if I leave before the train pulls out,” he said and drove off with a great show of bravery.

At last they were settled comfortably for the long trip to New York, Aunt Min with a magazine and the young people planning good times for the few days they were to be in the city before going aboard the yacht.

“We can go to see Emmeline Cerrito. Jack, you know she is our beautiful French friend who is studying for grand opera. She hopes to make her appearance this fall. Maybe she will sing for us. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a lovelier voice; have you, Jane?” Ellen loved music.

“And Sarah Manning is in training at the Presbyterian Hospital; we will certainly look her up and get her to come to dinner if she can get any time off,” suggested Jane.

“I want to get something for the ship’s library,” said Charlie, “and I think Carroll’s ‘Hunting of the Snark’ would be in order. It will help to comfort me during the first three or four days out. You know I’m nobody’s able seaman. My last year at college a bunch of us raced a yacht down to Bermuda and I want to say that, for three days, I wasn’t anything but in the way.” And poor Charlie winced at the unhappy memory.

“But that was one of those narrow little racing types,” soothed Ellen, “and Mabel says her father’s is a regular cruising boat and awfully comfortable.”

“Anyway, my beamish boy, I’ll stick by you and play ‘Heave-ho, my hearties’ on the trusty banjo while you lean o’er the rail,” Jack grinned.

“You boys are rather horrid,” said Aunt Min from behind her magazine. “And, by the way, I expect to be taken to the theatre every night, so don’t make too many plans.”

“Tickled to death to take you to any musical comedy you pick and to any roof garden afterwards,” said Jack. “You know, nothing really good runs in New York in the summer months.”

“And I suspect that you are not at all sorry,” teased Aunt Min.

“Speaking of plays, that reminds me that Betty Wyndham is at Provincetown with the Provincetown Players for the summer getting ready for next winter. She got them to take her on this spring. I know we will go to Plymouth and if we are that near we just can’t help going to see Betty,” said Ellen, planning happily.

“So we will really see all of our friends by hook or crook during the summer.” Then Jane yawned and announced that she was going to crawl into her berth and go to sleep.

When New York was finally reached, it took two taxis to deposit the travelers at their hotel. There the little party separated, Aunt Min going to her room to rest, the boys going out to “see the town,” and Ellen and Jane going to do their shopping.

“I love the way the New Yorkers hurry along all so intent on where they are going and so certain they are going to get there in the end,” said Ellen. “Neither one of us has a really working knowledge of the city so, no doubt, we will be lost one million times on the way to Abercrombie & Fitch’s.”

“Then we will just ask some genial Irish cop,” said Jane lightly. “I have never paid any attention to the ridiculous warnings of people who say, ‘Never talk to somebody you aren’t certain of.’ I flatter myself that I can tell at a glance whether a person is the kind of person to talk to or not.”

Deep in an argument in which Ellen favored getting gray flannel sport shirts and Jane khaki ones, the two girls got on the subway.

“We have been on here ten minutes, surely we will be there soon,” said Ellen glancing at her watch.

“So we would,” giggled the irrepressible Jane, “if we were going the right way. I noticed just now that we were on a car marked Bronx when we ought to be on a downtown express. I was going to give you to the next stop to notice it; after that of course I would have told you.”

“Next time we better not talk so much,” observed Ellen wisely as the girls rose to leave the car.

“Whew! I would like to come up for air. It’s so stuffy down here I can’t think which way we ought to go. If we just had some working hypothesis of where we are, then we might dope out some route to take,” lamented Jane.

Both girls looked round them with rather amused expressions. Finally, Ellen squealed and punched Jane. “There’s your genial Irish cop; go over and ask him how we must get to Abercrombie & Fitch’s.”

Jane marched over to the big fat policeman, plainly from Erin. He grinned invitingly at the world in general and, as she stopped in front of him, at her in particular.

“Yes, Mum,” he said.

“We took that horrid old Bronx subway and we didn’t mean to,” began Jane by way of lucid explanation.

“And not the first are ye, young lady, to do the same. Indade, it looks to me like folks only get to the Bronx by tryin’ to go some other place,” the big man announced.

Then Jane told him where they did want to go.

“I’m off duty now and it’s goin’ that way I am myself, so if it pleases ye I’ll just take ye,” said Sergeant Murphy.

Ellen had come up to them and was very profuse in her thanks, but the Sergeant brushed them aside with a hearty “’Tis nothin’.”

The two girls seated on either side of the big Irishman kept him grinning with their amusing chatter about nothing. The three of them were entirely oblivious of the utter unconventionality of the situation and would have been much surprised if they had heard the old women across the aisle whispering to one another.

It is certain that Ellen would have been very indignant if she had known that the young Russian on her left had kept his hand in his pocket all the way, so firm was the belief in his mind that she was a pickpocket.

Surprise showed through even the suave manner of the young salesman at Abercrombie & Fitch’s, but Ellen thought that it was brought forth by the fact that two girls wanted such a surprising number of men’s shirts.

As twilight came and with it no Ellen and Jane, Aunt Min began to get worried and called the boys in consultation. They decided to wait until time to go down for dinner and, if the girls hadn’t come in then, to notify the authorities so they might organize a search for them.

Aunt Min stood wringing her hands and moaning: “Such terrible things could happen to them. Charlie, don’t you remember that awful Chinaman that killed a girl in New York and put her in a trunk where they didn’t find her for ages and ages afterwards?”

“Ellen is so little. Oh! why didn’t I go with them?” and Jack cursed himself roundly for not taking care of the girl with whom he was in love.

Charlie was seated in a lounging chair taking the whole affair quite calmly. “Jack, please behave as though you had some sense. Those girls are about twenty years old, both of them with the average amount of intelligence, plenty of money in their pockets, and both on the outside of a good lunch. So they won’t starve to death and, if they are lost, they can grab a taxi and come to the hotel. I’m willing to bet on Plain Jane’s ingenuity to get ’em home even if they are both dead and in some Chinaman’s laundry bag. Probably what really happened is that they met someone they know and went some place for tea,” and Charlie went on peacefully eating chocolate creams.

“Oh! it is all very well for you to talk, but just suppose it was Mabel Wing who was lost and not Ellen. How about it then?” Jack asked.

“Mabel is too big to lose, so that is one thing I don’t have to worry about,” answered Charlie.

“Anyway, let’s go down in the lobby and wait,” said Aunt Min and led the way.

Once there they took seats facing the entrance and glued their eyes to the door. Consequently, when the girls came in flanking a big policeman, Aunt Min, Jack, and Charlie rose simultaneously and advanced upon them.

Aunt Min cried: “Thank heavens, Charlie Preston knows law! Jane Pellew, what have you done now?”

Jack beside himself was squeezing Ellen’s hand and saying: “Ellen, I am so glad they didn’t take you to jail first. I just know Charlie and I can fix it up with the cop.”

Charlie looked at them in a ruminating manner and murmured: “Too happy-looking for anything to be really the matter. Wish they’d come on and go in to dinner.”

“You are perfectly ridiculous, all of you. Aren’t they, Sergeant Murphy?” and Jane received an understanding wink from that son of the Emerald Isle.

“It was this way,” began Ellen and told of how the big policeman had taken them from shop to shop, and piloted them around all afternoon.

“So when we finished shopping,” broke in Jane, “I suggested that all of us go to a movie.”

“And a fine picture it was, Mum,” said Sergeant Murphy to Aunt Min, “with that Fairbanks lad abusting things wide open with every foot of reel.”

Jane turned to Sergeant Murphy and shaking his hand said: “Ellen and I want to thank you for your kindness and also for giving us such a lovely afternoon.”

“’Tis nothin’,” said Sergeant Murphy. “’Twas myself that had all the fun.”

CHAPTER III
THE BOOJUM

The first of July was a day so perfect that it might well have been made to order. The brilliant blue sky held little wisps of clouds that were scattered by a steady, gentle wind.

“That taxi will never come and I just can’t wait another instant. It should have been here long ago. I just know we’ll be late,” and Jane bobbed up from her chair and rushed to the window at the sound of every car that passed.

Mr. Wing had called them up the night before and asked them all to be out at City Island by ten o’clock. He planned to have lunch and be on the way by one.

“Patience, my dear sister, is like—well, something or other—I can’t remember just what, but it is a good old saying,” Jack flung over his shoulder as he went to answer the knock of the boy who had come to tell them that their taxi was waiting.

Mabel and Mr. Wing met them and took them down to the foot of one of the many little wharves that jutted out in the harbor.

“Frances is already on board. There wasn’t room in the tender for all of us,” Mabel explained. “Oh! I am so happy I can hardly stand it. It almost killed me when Ruth couldn’t come. You know she is taking some sort of social service course this summer and didn’t feel that she ought to stop right in the middle of it.”

“Yes, it must have been a disappointment,” agreed Ellen. “But maybe this will cheer you up some. I had a telegram from Anne Follet this morning saying that she and Ruth would try to be in New York for a few days when we get back.”

“Splendid, marvelous!” bubbled Mabel, who was hard to depress for long.

“Miss Pellew,” suggested Mr. Wing, “you come out and have lunch with us and I’ll have one of the men set you ashore directly after. I’d like to have you see the boat.”

“You are very kind, indeed,” said Aunt Min, rather hurriedly. “But couldn’t you point out your boat to me from here?”

“What, you aren’t afraid, are you?” Mr. Wing laughed that delightful laugh that so often accompanies fatness.

“Yes, I am,” admitted Aunt Min. “But don’t tell the girls or I’ll never hear the end of it.”

Mr. Wing pointed to a two-master, with a black hull. “She is the schooner type and was built by a shipbuilder at Gloucester, so she is as sturdy as a Gloucester fisherman, but her yachty lines give her more speed. She’s got a big Lathrop engine in her that can kick her along at ten knots when our wind goes dead on her. She has been almost everywhere and is perfectly able to go anywhere she hasn’t been.”

It was perfectly plain to Aunt Min that boats and water were Mr. Wing’s hobby even though she hadn’t understood half of what he had said, particularly about kicking her along. What was the object in kicking her along if there was an engine?

“None of this fancy yachting for me,” went on the black yacht’s owner. “I’m my own sailing-master because half the fun of yachting to me is the work it entails. Why, I love the feel of the old ‘Boojum’ as she answers to wheel! And let me tell you she handles quick. She is alive, every inch of her.”

“Well, I hope there are plenty of life preservers in convenient places. Thank heavens, all the girls can swim well!” Aunt Min looked rather dubiously at the “Boojum” and at its owner.

Somehow the black hull upset her. It smacked of the piratical and she had visions of drawn cutlasses and bearded men with their heads wrapped up in red rags. It would have been better, she thought, if the boat had been white, as she imagined all yachts were.

“My dear Miss Pellew, it is safe as safe can be and dry as a bone. It takes days to get a drop in her bilges,” Mr. Wing hastened to assure her.

“What in the world could be the advantage of it taking days to get a drop in the bilges, and what did bilges have to do with life preservers, and what were bilges anyway?” thought Aunt Min. But she only said, “Well, that is very nice, I am sure.”

Mabel had been explaining to her young guests that Mr. Wing was taking the boat out a little short-handed because he wanted all of them to learn something about sailing. “Daddy says it is exactly twice as much fun if every man on board has some little work to do. I adore steering by a point of land, but I just can’t bear to do it by the compass.”

“Much as I hate to tell Aunt Min good-bye, I wish we would shove off. I am wild to see it on the inside.” Jane’s black eyes snapped at the prospect.

Soon the young people were seated in the dancing tender and, with many good-byes to Aunt Min, they scooted through the sparkling stretch of water that lay between them and the “Boojum.”

“Mabel, how in the world do you ever get over the side and up on deck?” asked Ellen uneasily.

“She is falling off a lot, I think,” defended Charlie.

“Goose, I didn’t mean that. I mean, how does anybody do it?”

“You see there is a little ladder that they hook on the side whenever people want to get off or on and when it isn’t being used, it is kept on deck,” Mabel explained.

Two men in spotless blue denim work suits appeared on the deck as Mabel finished speaking and lowered the sea ladder over the side of the “Boojum.”

“Jane, you go first,” whispered Ellen.

“The water is perfectly flat today, but there will be days when it won’t be, so you might just as well begin by being careful,” explained Mr. Wing. “Step in the middle of the boat, grab hold of the sides of the ladder and step up as lightly as you can because, if you give much of a spring from the tender, it is liable to push us away from the ‘Boojum’.”

“It is nice to know that I have you in my power,” Jane laughed.

However, Jane did not take advantage of her new found power but made an impressive embarkation on the “Boojum.” Her sureness and quickness won a gleam of approbation from the keen gray eyes of the bronzed young sailor, who had offered her a hand, which she smilingly refused.

“Pretty good for a land-lubber, Jane,” applauded Mr. Wing. “Now, Ellen, see if you can do as well.”

“Ellen, you are so light, you couldn’t push us away to save your soul,” said Jack rather proudly.

“And I just bounce up from long practice,” giggled Mabel.

With all of them safe on deck, Mr. Wing gave a few orders to the two men, telling the short Dutchman to serve lunch as soon as it was ready and the young sailor to haul the tender up in the davits. “And Jack, you better help Breck. Sorry to put you to work so soon.”

Mr. Wing led the way down the companion into the saloon. “I hope Mabel can make you fairly comfortable, girls. You will feel a bit cramped at first, but most people soon accustom themselves to it. She is very compact and it really is just a matter of adjusting yourself to a smaller scale. Now I must go above and see that we get under way. Charlie, Mabel tells me you have been cruising before and I’m going to depend a lot on you. As soon as you stow your duds, come up and help Breck and me with the sails.”

“I’m a peach of a crew, I’ll admit,” and Charlie chanted:

“What delicious nonsense! What is it?” queried Ellen.

“Mabel, you explain, I’ve got to go, for the ‘Boojum’s’ piped all hands on deck,” and Charlie scrambled up the companion.

“Your education has been neglected if you don’t know Lewis Carroll’s ‘Hunting of the Snark.’ Why, you do, don’t you, Plain Jane?” demanded Mabel.

“Brought up on it,” answered Jane. “Must I prove it?”

Suddenly the brown curtains before one of the bunks that were on each side of the saloon were flung aside, and Frances Bliss poked out a tousled head and started,

“Plain Jane and Ellen, I am just as glad to see you as though you hadn’t waked me up. Come, salute me.”

Both girls made a dash for their disheveled friend.

“Well, get out of Daddy’s bunk and tell Ellen the tragedy of the Snark while I take Jane into your little stateroom and show her where she can scrouge in her clothes,” commanded Mabel.

Frances crawled out of the bunk and began, “Well, my poor little ignorant friend, it is this way: The Snark was a fabulous creature of great value, so great in fact that a band of worthy gentlemen set out to catch it. This band was headed by the noble Bellman who was much respected by the others. One of these gentlemen was a Baker and was unfortunate enough to vanish in thin air after the Snark was caught, because it proved to be a Boojum. Now it is all nice and clear, isn’t it, my priceless child?”

“About as clear as mud,” laughed Ellen. “I’ll get a copy and read it so I’ll know what you lunatics are talking about. Anyway, I’m glad I know where Mr. Wing got that ridiculous name for this lovely boat.”

Mabel had taken Jane into a tiny stateroom with two narrow little bunks, one over the other.

“The lockers are under the lower bunk and you can put your rough clothes in there. Bring your suit and hat into my cabin and I will put them in my closet. Ellen and I are in the ‘Skipper’s cabin.’ It has a double bunk that folds up against the side of the cabin and has the only full length closet in the ‘Boojum.’ Consequently, the whole bunch will have to keep their good clothes in it,” said Mabel. “And now, if you and Ellen are ready, let’s go up on deck and maybe we can pick up some dope on how to put up the sails.”

The four girls ran up the companion, the two newcomers giving their heads a terrific bump on the main boom.

“Mabel, you horrible creature, why didn’t you tell us to duck?” wailed Jane, holding her throbbing head.

“No use,” answered Mabel in cruel tones. “Daddy says that everybody has to butt their heads a certain number of times on the main boom of a yacht and the sooner they begin, the sooner it is over.” Then relenting a bit, she added, “I’ll warn you to this extent; whenever we are at anchor and whenever the sails are down, that is just where the boom is going to be.”

The girls were standing in the cockpit, looking with admiration at the immaculate deck gleaming in the July sun, and the shining brass work. “Oh! just imagine keeping a house as clean as this. It would keep you working every minute,” said Ellen.

Mr. Wing let go the rope he was coiling and turned a beaming countenance on the girls. “I’ve got a splendid idea,” he said. “You girls can take entire charge of the metal work on the good ship ‘Boojum’ and, if I see a single dull place on it, I’ll put half of you in irons and the rest of you on hard tack and water.”

“There are no irons on board but flat irons, girls,” Mabel wriggled an unbelievable length of pink tongue at her father, “so don’t let him scare you.”

“Well, anyway I can see by your feet that you are very wise children,” said Mr. Wing as he went forward to see what Jack had done with the rope he had been left to coil.

“What in the world does he mean, Mabel?” giggled Frances. “Your father is the funniest man!”

“He means that we have all got on tennis shoes and that endears you to the heart of any yachtsman, for it is so easy on the decks. Some yacht owners keep an extra supply of them on hand so that anybody without them can be supplied,” explained Mabel.

The good-looking young sailor whom Mr. Wing had called Breck came aft to the girls and, touching the white cap that covered a very small part of his crisp black hair, said to Mabel, “Miss Wing, the steward says that lunch is ready in the saloon.”

“Ah, the low pleasures of the table!” said Mabel with a great show of licking her chops, then called to the men working up forward, “Hey, you kids, we are going to lunch and it will be all gone in about two seconds because the lady crew is hungry as sharks and is not going to wait for you.”

“You don’t have to,” and, with surprising lightness, fat Charlie Preston jumped down the galley hatch, ignoring the ladder and had his feet under the table before the others had time to shut the mouths that had opened in surprise as he disappeared below.

CHAPTER IV
ANCHOR WEIGHED

Mr. Wing rose from the little table that had been spread in the saloon and said, “We’ll break the anchor out with the jib as soon as Breck has eaten. I hate this old engine like poison, though she’s a good old girl in case of emergency. But I have made it a rule not to use her unless it is really necessary.”

“What in the world is a jib?” queried Frances with a puzzled expression. “I thought it was some part of your face because my small brother used to say ‘If you don’t shut up, Sis, I’ll bust you one in the jib.’”

“In this case, it is the sail that is fastened on the bowsprit. There are a lot of things to learn on a boat, but don’t give up because, before the cruise is over, you girls are going to be able to sail the ship by yourselves and we men can take it easy; isn’t that right, Jack?” and Mr. Wing went up on deck to uncover the wheel.

Mabel advised her friends to stay below until the “Boojum” was well under way. There was always a great deal of excitement on deck whenever they left a harbor and it might be just as well for all concerned if they kept out of the way until they got the hang of things nautical.

Ellen borrowed “The Hunting of the Snark” from Charlie and announced that she was going to curl up on the transom in the saloon and become familiar enough with it by supper to beat the others at their own game.