er'ble happy over the way things had
worked out.

"Nice sailing breeze, ain't it?" says I, smiling.

"Where's Mau-Miss Stumpton?" he says, wild like.

"She's abed, I cal'late," says I, "getting her beauty sleep. Why don't
YOU turn in? Or are you pretty enough now?"

He looked first at me and then at Jonadab, and his face turned a little
yellower than usual.

"What kind of a game is this?" he asks, brisk. "Where are you going?"

'Twas Jonadab that answered. "We're bound," says he, "for the Bermudas.
It's a lovely place to spend the winter, they tell me," he says.

That poet never made no remarks. He jumped to the stern and caught hold
of the skiff's painter. I shoved him out of the way and picked up the
boat hook. Jonadab rolled up his shirt sleeves and laid hands on the
centerboard stick.

"I wouldn't, if I was you," says the cap'n.

Jonadab weighs pretty close to two hundred, and most of it's gristle.
I'm not quite so much, fur's tonnage goes, but I ain't exactly a canary
bird. Montague seemed to size things up in a jiffy. He looked at us,
then at the sail, and then at the shore out over the stern.

"Done!" says he. "Done! And by a couple of 'farmers'!"

And down he sets on the thwart.

Well, we sailed all that day and all that night. 'Course we didn't
really intend to make the Bermudas. What we intended to do was to cruise
around alongshore for a couple of weeks, long enough for the Stumptons
to get back to Dillaway's, settle the copper business and break for
Montana. Then we was going home again and turn Brown's relation over to
him to take care of. We knew Peter'd have some plan thought out by that
time. We'd left a note telling him what we'd done, and saying that we
trusted to him to explain matters to Maudina and her dad. We knew that
explaining was Peter's main holt.

The poet was pretty chipper for a spell. He set on the thwart and
bragged about what he'd do when he got back to "Petey" again. He said we
couldn't git rid of him so easy. Then he spun yarns about what him and
Brown did when they was out West together. They was interesting yarns,
but we could see why Peter wa'n't anxious to introduce Cousin Henry to
Belle. Then the Patience M. got out where 'twas pretty rugged, and she
rolled consider'ble and after that we didn't hear much more from friend
Booth--he was too busy to talk.

That night me and Jonadab took watch and watch. In the morning it
thickened up and looked squally. I got kind of