Читать онлайн
Four Afloat: Being the Adventures of the Big Four on the Water
Four Afloat: Being the Adventures of the Big Four on the Water
CHAPTER I – INTRODUCES A GASOLINE LAUNCH, FOUR BOYS, AND A DOG
“She’s a pu-pu-pu-pu – !”
“Quite so, Tommy,” said Dan soothingly, “but don’t excite yourself.”
“ – pu-pu-peach!”
“Oh, all right!” laughed Nelson. “I thought you were trying to call her a puppy. What do you think of her, Bob?”
“Best ever,” answered Bob promptly and quietly.
They were standing, the four of them – “to say nothing of the dog,” which in this case was a wide-awake wire-haired terrier – on the edge of a wharf overlooking a small slip in which, in spite of the fact that it was the last week in June and many of the winter tenants had been hauled out and placed in commission, a dozen or more boats lay huddled. There were many kinds of pleasure craft there, from an eighty-foot yawl, still housed over, to a tiny sixteen-foot launch which rejoiced in the somewhat inappropriate name of Formidable. Beyond the slip was another wharf, a marine railway, masts and spars, and, finally, the distant rise of Beacon Hill, crowned with the glittering, golden dome of the State House. To their right, beyond the end of the jutting wharf, Boston Harbor lay blue and inviting in the morning sunlight. From the boat yard came the sound of mallet and caulking iron, and the steady puff-puff, puff-puff of the machine-shop exhaust. Nearer at hand a graceful sloop was being hurriedly overhauled, and the slap-slap of the paint brush and the rasp of the scraper were mingled. The air was pleasantly redolent of fresh paint and new wood – oak and cedar and pine – and the salty breath of the ocean. And to the four boys all these things appealed strongly, since they were on the verge of a summer cruise and were beginning to feel quite nautical.
The object of their enthusiasm lay below them at the edge of the wharf – a handsome gasoline cruising launch, bright with freshly polished brass work, gleaming with new varnish, and immaculate in scarcely dry paint. She was thirty-six feet long over all, nine feet in extreme breadth, and had a draught of three feet. A hunting cabin began five feet from the bow, and extended eighteen feet to the beginning of the cockpit. The sides of the cabin were mahogany and the roof was covered with canvas. A shining brass hand rail ran around the edge of the roof, a brass steering wheel protruded through it at the sternmost end, and toward the bow a search light stood like a gleaming sentinel above a small whistle. Between wheel and search light rested, inverted and securely lashed to the roof, a ten-foot cedar tender. The cockpit was nine feet long, and, like the deck fore and aft, was floored with narrow strips of white pine which, since the scrapers had just left it, looked, under its new coat of varnish, as white and clean as a kitchen table. There were iron stanchions to support an awning which, when in place, extended from well forward of the steering wheel to the stern of the cockpit, where a curved seat, with a locker beneath it, ran across the end. (“There are some wicker chairs that go in the cockpit,” Nelson was explaining, “but we won’t need more than a couple of them.”) Below the water-line the boat was painted green. Above that the hull was aglisten with white to the upper strake save where a slender gold line started at the bow and terminated at the graceful canoe stern just short of the gold letters which spelled the boat’s name.
“Vagabond,” said Dan. “That’s a dandy name.”
“Mighty appropriate for a boat that you’re in,” added Bob unkindly. “Come on, Nel; I’m dying to see inside of her.”
“All right. Here’s the ladder over here.”