POLLY PREPARES

It was dark when the girls reached the cottage on the island that night. They lingered at the Life Saving Station until the Captain ordered them home, and then Tom led the way with a lantern along the shore road. There was no moon, but the stars shone, and the wind had gone down, leaving the sea quiet, except for the long, lazy swells that brushed along the ocean beach to their left.

Once Tom paused at a rise in the ground and pointed away off to the south side of the Sickle where a light twinkled.

“That’s the half-way house,” he told them. “They have one every two miles along shore; the men meet there and exchange slips and pass on. I’ll be glad when I’m old enough to join.”

“Say, Polly,” exclaimed Ruth that night, as the girls sat around in the living-room, after they were undressed, combing their hair, and chatting girl fashion, “isn’t it queer that people who lead lives of danger never seem to think anything of it at all?”

“You’re never afraid of anything you know all about,” Kate put in. “It’s the unknown danger that scares you.”

“I mean firemen, and soldiers, and life-savers—”

“And mothers and fathers, and heroes generally,” put in Polly, as she sat on a sofa cushion, her long, brown curls falling loosely around her, and her pink kimono slipped on over her night gown, for the nights were always cool on the bay. “I know what you mean, Ruth. It’s because they have so much else to think about that they haven’t time to worry. Tom’s all ready to make a business of being a hero, and he doesn’t realize it is being a hero. He thinks it’s lots of fun.”

“Girls,” called out Sue from the table, where she was tracing strange figures on a sheet of paper, “does the course cut around this side of Smugglers’ Cove, or the Inlet side?”

“Inlet,” Polly replied. “It’s a straight line due northeast, then east by southeast for the channel.”

“Then we can see it better from our own porch than from the Orienta.”

“I know we can, but we’re going over to the Orienta, because grandfather will be there, we hope, and we want to be all mixed in with the really, truly yachtsmen.”

“It won’t matter the first day, Polly, because that’s for the largest boats. They are to sail on a fifteen-mile course, Dorothy says, out to sea, then zigzag back to Tarker’s Light, and along shore home. The second day is for thirty-footers and forty-footers, and they take the north shore run for eight miles and back. The third day is ours, the twenty-footers and under, and we are to sail right here in Eagle Bay, from the club to the Point, and across the bay to the mouth of the Inlet, then back on the two-mile stretch to Fair Havens.”

“It’s more than two miles from the Inlet to Fair Havens,” protested Crullers.

“No, it isn’t,” said Polly. “Nancy and I have sailed it often. It’s a longer stretch from the club house to the Point by a mile, than it is from Fair Havens to the Inlet, because the Sickle runs away out into the sea, don’t you know.”

“How many of us are going to enter for the Junior Cup?” Kate asked.

Polly looked around her at the assembled group. Isabel and Crullers preserved a dignified silence. Ruth hesitated, pondering many things. Only Sue and Ted and Kate said positively that they would enter the race for twenty-footers and under; Sue with the Patsy D., Ted with the Hurricane, and Kate with her skip-jack, the Witch Cat.

“Nancy’s going to enter the Pirate,” Polly said. “And I will sail the Tidy Jane! How about you, Ruth?”

“Polly, I don’t honestly think I had better go into the race. I can’t manage the Iris well enough to race her, and I’ll be sure to get into somebody’s way if they don’t succeed in getting into mine first.”

“No, you won’t, Grandma. Stop your fussing,” laughed Polly. “You can sail a boat as well as any of us, and it’s lots of fun. Dorothy says we will be the only outsiders in that class, the rest are Juniors from the Orienta.”

“Boys?” Ruth’s tone was ominous.

“I don’t know whether they will be boys or pollywogs,” said Polly, her eyes full of mischief. “Who’s afraid, anyway? I’d just as soon race against boys as girls.”

“No boys in the twenty-footer class,” called Kate.

“How do you know?”

“I asked Tom. The only boys’ yacht club around here is the Pautipaug Beach Club, about five miles east, and they never race, he says. All they do is fish, and camp out, and slosh around shore.”

“What’s that?” asked Polly.

“I don’t know. Tom called it that. He says they hoist a sail, and lash the tiller, and then go to sleep.”

“Well, that’s only one of Tom’s yarns, but just the same I think that is all most yacht clubs do, ‘slosh around shore.’” Polly’s tone was full of fine, ringing scorn.

“But, Polly, there are five or six girls from the Orienta Juniors, and we’ll have to race against them.”

“All the more fun,” responded the Commodore with true sportsmanlike generosity. “I do hope that grandfather will come north so he can see it.”

“And watch us win,” added Sue.

“Oh, you may laugh,” persisted Polly, happily, “but I can’t see why one of us shouldn’t win. We can sail our boats every bit as well as Dorothy and Bess, or any Orienta girl. Nancy is the only one who can beat us, and I’d just as soon she did, if it had to be somebody. It would be for the glory of our club anyway, if she did. Week after next, children, nine days, to be accurate, as Fraulein used to say, is the event, and we must clean up our old hulls, and get in line, and practise along the course. It means work, every single day, with our sleeves rolled up.”

“Well, I am not going to race,” Isabel said, decidedly. “I want to finish my shell portÌere before we go home, and fix up my collection, and it’s too hard work.”

“I’d like to race, but I’m afraid to,” Crullers put in, dubiously. “Polly, I just can’t.”

“Well, don’t then,” said Polly, cheerfully. “You two can be our rocking-chair fleet. There’s always one in every club. You may sit up here and enjoy the view with Aunty Welcome.”

The following days were the busiest that Lost Island had seen that summer. Tom and Nancy came over every morning, after their own work was done, advising and assisting. Dorothy and Bess were enthusiastic over the Junior event. There were more entries for it than ever before, Commodore Vaughan said, and they were all girls. Every afternoon the graceful little “cats” and knockabouts, yawls and skipjacks, sailed on the bay, and it looked as if Nancy and Dorothy had the best showing, for theirs were the largest boats.

The course was neither difficult nor dangerous in any way, and providing the weather and wind held fair, the race was bound to be a spirited one, for it would be a straight away run.

One day they all went over to the Orienta Club to look at the trophy the winner of the Junior event would bear away. It was an exact reproduction of the large Championship Cup the Orienta Club had held for several years. The cup stood about eight inches high, lined with gold, and shaped like a chalice, the outer side was of richly chased silver, and engraved.

“I like that very much,” Polly remarked, critically, as she scrutinized the workmanship on it. “Don’t you remember, Ruth, the summer we went down to Old Point Comfort with grandfather and saw the regatta? I went on the committee boat that day, and followed the race. But the cup didn’t look like a cup at all. It looked more like a silver ice-water pitcher.”

“Maybe it was a flagon,” Kate said meditatively. “Did it have a beak, and a handle?”

“Two handles,” Polly returned, “and a large curved beak, and a cover to it like a syrup jug. And yet they called it a cup.”

“This one has two handles, look, Polly,” said Ted. “I like it that way.”

“So do I,” said Sue. “I shall enjoy drinking the Patsy D.’s health in it with Aunty Welcome’s fruit lemonade after the race is won.”

“Listen to her, Polly. As if her old Patsy had any chance at all against my Hurricane.”

Sue smiled, and slipped her arm through Ted’s.

“Bide a wee, Edwina,” she laughed. “I’ll let you drink out of it first of all.”

The day before the regatta was an exciting one on Eagle Bay. Sometime the night before the Adventure dropped anchor, and the first object the girls beheld the following morning was the slender, low yacht, with her great uplift of spars and white-clad sailors running about the deck.

“She’s won ever so many cups,” Dorothy said, as they watched her through opera glasses, which Polly had thought to slip in with her equipment. “They stand all in a long row on her cabin sideboard. And she’s worth over fifty thousand dollars. When I told papa I thought that was too much to pay for a yacht, he laughed at me and said some steam yachts cost as much as that just to keep traveling for a year.”

“There comes another one around the Point,” called Ted. “That’s a yawl, isn’t it?”

“Auxiliary yawl,” corrected Dorothy. “How queer her sails look from here, the big mainsail, and topsail, and the jib, and then that funny spread down near the end. Makes me think of a cat and her kitten. But wait till the sloops arrive. I like them the best. They are so stately and slender, and when they sail under full canvas they dip to the wind like gulls.”

Polly had hesitated over putting fresh coats of paint on the Tidy Jane, and the Iris. The other boats were in fairly good order, for Tom and his father had repainted them early in the spring for the Holmes boys. But that final week before the event, Polly painted and caulked seams, and overhauled with an energy and vim that made even Tom remonstrate.

“Now you mind what I tell you, it won’t make them go a bit faster, not a bit,” he grumbled, when Polly coaxed him to help them fix a dry dock.

“Oh, but Tom, they’ll look so handsome,” pleaded Polly. “I’m going to run a beautiful dark blue belt ribbon of paint around the Tidy Jane, and then, under strained circumstances—”

“Now, see here,” Tom crawled laboriously out from under the Jane, a paint pot in one hand and a brush in the other, “you can strain all the circumstances you want, but she won’t go a bit faster.”

The girls broke into a peal of laughter at him, but Tom stolidly refused to see anything funny in the whole proceeding and went on painting reluctantly.

But it paid, even the Captain said so the last day, when he came over on a tour of inspection, and approved of the Polly Page Club’s racers, clean and trim as paint and polish could make them.

“Aren’t they handsome?” asked Polly, proudly, as she stood beside him on the landing, and surveyed the fleet.

“Fine and dandy,” echoed the Captain, heartily. “If they act as saucy as they look, there won’t be a running chance for any other boat on the bay. You want to look out for the Jane, mind. Don’t give her her head. She’s a smart one, now, I tell you. I never let her find out she could get the best of me, but she was always a-trying. Make her feel your hand steady on the tiller, every minute, or she’ll bolt like a wild thing. And when she takes a notion to tilt on her beam end in a good puff of wind, why, let her tilt. She can’t do a mite of harm, not a mite. I’ve had her out when the seas would skip clean over her, and half fill the cockpit, and she’d tilt till she’d lift her centerboard out of the water. Yes, ma’am. And what did I do? Just patted her down easy, and let her drift off a bit to leeward till the wind spilled out of her sail, and when she came about again, she’d right herself like a lady and walk on.”

Polly nodded comprehendingly.

“I know how she acts,” she said. “And that’s just the way I feel about her, too, Captain Carey, as if she were alive, and could almost understand what I say to her.”

“Well, it’s something plain humans can’t know about,” the Captain answered, in his slow, restful, philosophic way. “Every boat on the face of the waters has got just as much personality as you or I, and they’ve got dispositions too. I’ve shipped before now on vessels that you couldn’t make behave themselves any more’n you could harness up a porpoise to a plough. Then I’ve shipped on bashful, nervous creeturs of boats, that would dance and shiver their timbers from one beam end to another, for all the world like some old woman. There was a three-master out of Martha’s Vineyard when I was a lad. She carried various articles of trade along the west coast of Africa, and she was the skeeriest thing I ever sailed on. She had her favorites among the crew too, mind you. I’ve seen her fairly tremble and waver when the pilot for the day would take hold of her. He was a big, slow chap from a place called Noank down on the Connecticut shore. Name was Shad Hardy, and it suited him. He had the identical expression of a shad. I was on night duty then at the wheel, and the minute she’d feel my hand on the spokes, she was like a lamb. I’d speak to her, and steady her up a bit, and she’d march along in the wind, like a grenadier to band music. I always did say it wa’n’t no use trying to make a ship like you, when it had made up its mind it wouldn’t. They’re the notioniest things alive, ’cepting females, and I sometimes think that’s why some discerning seaman called a boat ‘she’ and set public opinion that way.”

“Oh, Captain, when you know how nice we are, and how we mind you,” rebuked Polly. “Just wait till to-morrow.”

“The Junior race won’t come off till the third day Tom tells me,” the Captain answered. “And that makes me think.” He dipped into his jacket pocket, and pulled forth neat rolls of twine and lines, a pouch of tobacco, and some keys. “They just gave me a telegram for you over at the hotel. Here ’tis. No, ’tain’t. Avast there, maybe it’s down below. Nancy and mother told me not to give it to you sudden, for fear it might be bad news.”

“Oh, I don’t think it is,” Polly said, hopefully. She never went out and opened the gate for trouble, not Polly.

The Captain drew forth the yellow envelope gingerly.

“I wouldn’t open it in too big a hurry, anyway,” he warned. “Better take such matters pretty easy. I’m suspicious of the pesky things every time I see one. I never got one yet that told me any good news. It always plumps you full of bad surprises, all to once.”

“Well, this is good news,” Polly cried, as she glanced over the sheet of paper. “It’s from grandfather, and he’ll be here to-morrow, and stay for regatta week, then take us home with him! Let’s see, from the fifteenth to the twenty-second is the regatta, then allowing four days down the coast we’ll get to Queen’s Ferry just in time to rest up before school opens.”

The Captain’s eyes twinkled under their bushy brows.

“I shall have to hand in a true and faithful report if the Admiral asks me for one,” he said.

“Oh, but we’ve been good, haven’t we, Captain Carey?”

“Fair to middlin’, fair to middlin’,” laughed the old sailor, as he started down the beach, and Polly ran up to the house to break the news to the other girls.