Swept Out to Sea Or, Clint Webb Among the Whalers

Excerpt

In Which My Cousin and I have a Serious Falling Out

The wind had died to just a breath, barely filling the canvas of the Wavecrest. We were slowly making the mouth of the inlet at Bolderhead after a day’s fishing. Occasionally as the fitful breeze swooped down the sloop made a pretty little run, then she’d sulk, with the sail flapping, till another puff came. I lay in the stern with my hand on the tiller, half asleep, while Paul Downes, my cousin, was stretched forward of the mast, wholly in dreamland. A little roll of the sloop as she tacked, almost threw him into the water and he awoke with a snarl and sat up.

“For goodness sake! aren’t we in yet?” he demanded, crossly. “What you been doing for the last hour Clint Webb? We’re no nearer the inlet now than we were then, I swear!”

That was a peculiarity about Paul. He was addicted to laying the faults of even inanimate objects to the charge of other people; and as for himself personally, he was never in the wrong! Now he felt that he must have somebody on whom to vent his vexation—and hunger; I was used to being that scapegoat, and it was seldom that I paid much attention to his snarling. On this particular occasion, I said, calmly:

“Now, Paul, you know very well that I hold no position with the Meteorological Bureau, and therefore you shouldn’t lay the sins of the weather to me.”

“Huh! ain’t you smart?” he grunted.

You see, Paul had awakened in rather a quarrelsome frame of mind while—well, I was hungry, too (it was long past our dinner hour) and so felt in a tantalizing mood. If we had not been at just these odds on this lovely September evening, the incidents which follow might never have occurred. Out of this foolish beginning of a quarrel came a chain of circumstances which entirely changed the current of my life. Had I held my tongue I would have been saved much sorrow and peril, and many, many regrets.

“I’m smart—I admit it,” said I, cooly; “but I can’t govern the wind. We’ll get in by bedtime.”

“And nothing to eat aboard,” growled Paul.

“There’s the fish you caught,” said I, chuckling.

Paul had had abominable luck all day, the only thing he landed being what we Bolderhead boys called a “grunter”—a frog-mouthed fish of most unpleasant aspect and of absolutely no use as food. All it did when he shook it off his hook in disgust was to swell up like a toy balloon and emit an objective grunt whenever it was poked. Funny, but these “grunters” always reminded me of Paul.

Now, at my suggestion, my cousin broke into another tirade of abuse of the Wavecrest, and what he termed my carelessness. I didn’t care much what he said about me, and I suppose there was some reason for his criticism; I should not have gone outside the inlet without more than just a bite of luncheon in the cuddy. But when he referred to my bonnie sloop as “an old tub” and said it wasn’t rigged right and that I didn’t know how to sail her, then—well, I leave it to you if it wouldn’t have made you huffy?...