Charles Roberts - Reube Dare's Shad Boat

After an hour’s run Wood Point was left behind, and there was the Dido not a mile ahead and well inshore. She had been delayed in the eddies of the cove below the Point. Reube gave a shout of joy and twisted his helm to starboard, while Will warned him to look out for the mud flats with which the cove was choked.

“O,” said Reube, confidently, “I know the place like a book.”

The red-and-white pinkie was now rapidly overhauling the vagrant craft when a stiff current caught the latter and she began to race along the curve of the farther shore. Reube was anxious to catch her before she should round the next headland, and get back into rough water. The headland was a low, humped promontory of mingled plaster rocks and yellowish sand, without a tree upon its grassy crest. Shifting his course to intercept the Dido , Reube steered the pinkie straight for the point. Just then the Dido was seen to give a lurch, stop short, and keel over to the gunwale.

“She’s run aground!” cried Will.

“But we’ve got her safe and will sail her back on next tide,” said Reube, heaving a sigh of relief as he saw that his beloved craft stood still, refusing to be rolled over by the push of the yellow tide upon her ribs.

The pinkie was sailing at a great pace.

“Better take in the jib, Will,” said Reube.

Will sprang up to obey. Just as he rose there was a staggering shock. The pinkie buried her nose in a hidden mudbank. The waves piled over her gunwales; the mast bent without breaking, like the brave, tough timber it was; and Will shot overboard headlong into the foam.

ACTING instantly on the impulse of an old sailor, Reube had sprung forward almost with the shock, and started to haul down the mainsail in order to relieve the strain. The next moment, however, while the half-lowered sail was bulging and flapping, he leaped into the bow to help Will. The latter rose with a gasp and stood waist deep, clinging to the bowsprit. His head and arms were bedaubed grotesquely with the mud into which he had plunged with such violence. He gazed sternly at Reube, and exclaimed:

“Perhaps you’ll claim that you know these mud banks as well as I do! I earnestly hope you may, some day, gain the same intimate knowledge of them!”

Then he climbed aboard and finished the furling of the sails, while Reube rolled convulsively in the bottom of the boat, unable to control his laughter. He recovered himself only when Will trod upon him without apology, and threatened to put him overboard.

When the sails had been made snug, and the pinkie bailed out, and the mud cleaned with pains from Will’s face and hair and garments, there was nothing to do but watch the Dido in the distance and wait for the tide to fall. In another half hour, or a little more, only a waste of red flats and yellow pools separated the two stranded boats. Reube took off his shoes and socks, rolled his trousers up high, and stepped overboard. These precautions were for Will superfluous; so he went as he was, and congratulated himself on being able to defy all hidden clam shells. Before he went, however, he took the precaution to put out the pinkie’s anchor, for which Reube derided him.

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Professor Roberts has already told the spirited story of “How the Carter Boys Lifted the Mortgage,” in a volume, The Raid from Beauséjour, which is published by Hunt & Eaton, New York.