“Ain’t it?” said Harvey, who was drawing water (he had learned just how to wiggle the bucket), after an unusually long dressing-down. “Shouldn’t mind striking some poor ground for a change, then.”
“All the graound I want to see—don’t want to strike her—is Eastern Point,” said Dan. “Say, Dad, it looks’s if we wouldn’t hev to lay more’n two weeks on the Shoals. You’ll meet all the comp’ny you want then, Harve. That’s the time we begin to work. No reg’lar meals fer no one then. ’Mug-up when ye’re hungry, an’ sleep when ye can’t keep awake. Good job you wasn’t picked up a month later than you was, or we’d never ha’ had you dressed in shape fer the Old Virgin.”
Harvey understood from the Eldridge chart that the Old Virgin and a nest of curiously named shoals were the turning-point of the cruise, and that with good luck they would wet the balance of their salt there. But seeing the size of the Virgin (it was one tiny dot), he wondered how even Disko with the hog-yoke and the lead could find her. He learned later that Disko was entirely equal to that and any other business and could even help others. A big four-by-five blackboard hung in the cabin, and Harvey never understood the need of it till, after some blinding thick days, they heard the unmelodious tooting of a foot-power foghorn—a machine whose note is as that of a consumptive elephant.
They were making a short berth, towing the anchor under their foot to save trouble. “Square-rigger bellowin’ fer his latitude,” said Long Jack. The dripping red headsails of a bark glided out of the fog, and the We’re Here rang her bell thrice, using sea shorthand.
The larger boat backed her topsail with shrieks and shoutings.
“Frenchman,” said Uncle Salters, scornfully. “Miquelon boat from St. Malo.” The farmer had a weatherly sea-eye. “I’m ’most outer ’baccy, too, Disko.”