Everybody shouted at once.
“Trial trip,” said Captain Flint, “and if all’s right, we’ll be off down Channel next day.”
“What about Swallow?” asked Titty, when things had quietened down again after this bit of news.
“You can take her sailing this afternoon,” said Captain Flint.
For an hour after dinner John and Nancy were still wanted on deck, and Titty was helping the mates with washing up and the cleaning of an obstinate frying-pan. But the moment to which they had been looking forward came at last. Captain Flint and Peter Duck stopped work for a minute or two while they lowered the little sailing boat into the water, and fixed a rope ladder over the side of the Wild Cat so that the crew could go down her side into the Swallow like a lot of pilots going down into a boat at sea.
“Are you all right?” called Captain Flint, when John and Nancy had stepped the mast and everybody was aboard.
“Quite all right,” said John, though he was feeling a little nervous at sailing Swallow in strange waters and for the first time for nearly a year.
“Catch!” Captain Flint dropped the end of the painter. Roger coiled it away before the mast. Nancy pushed off from the Wild Cat’s green side. Susan and Peggy were hauling up the old brown sail with its well-remembered patch. Titty’s little flag was already fluttering at the mast-head. They were off.
The wind was coming down from Oulton, and for a moment or two John tacked up against it just to get the feel of the tiller, but as soon as he was sure that Swallow was still the same old Swallow and that he had not forgotten how to sail her, they decided they would go through the swing bridge to have a look at the outer harbour.
“The Wild Cat does look fine,” said John.
“I should think she does,” said Nancy. “That green paint just suits her. And all the new halyards. I say, John, let’s have a look at the black schooner.”
“She’s rather a beauty, too,” said John, as they slipped across towards her.
“Much too good to belong to a man like that,” said Nancy.
“Sh!” said Susan.
“There he is,” said Peggy.
They were close to her now and looking up they saw Black Jake scowling down at them over the stern of his vessel.
The wind freshened a little, and Swallow felt it. She was moving very fast. They had just time to read the name painted in big white letters across the stern of the schooner, “VIPER: BRISTOL,” and then they were slipping away towards the bridge and hoping that the puff of wind would last them through it.
“What a funny name for a boat,” said Roger.
They had a fine sail round the outer harbour, looking into one basin after another. They saw the Government fishery vessel, with the reindeer horns from Lapland fastened up on the bridge. They watched one of the fishing ketches sail out between the pier heads. “That’s where we’ll be going tomorrow,” said Nancy. Then John gave Nancy the tiller, and she sailed the Swallow into Hamilton Dock, where they saw the steam trawlers. By that time Susan and Peggy were thinking they ought to be putting a kettle on to boil, so they sailed back, though they had to use oars in getting through under the swing bridge. They put the cooks aboard, and then John, Nancy, Titty, and Roger went off for a last half-hour of sailing.
They tacked away up the inner harbour, past the dry dock and the vessels being repaired, past the grey dredgers at work getting up the mud from the bottom. They did not go very far before turning back. With Captain Flint and Peter Duck working so hard they did not want to be even a minute late. They were on their way home sailing with the wind down the middle of the Channel, and John was just going to turn across to the Wild Cat when Titty, looking at the Viper, suddenly said, “There’s that boy.”
“What boy?” asked Roger. “Where?”
“There,” said Titty, but she did not point. “The boy with the red hair. He’s fishing. Fishing from the Viper. Look!”
Everybody saw him now, sitting on the Viper’s bulwarks, with his feet over the side. He was holding the end of a fishing-line that went straight down into the water below him.
After what they had heard of Black Jake, and after what they had seen of him, they were inclined to be sorry for any boy who served aboard his ship. It must, they thought, be pretty awful. Not at all like being aboard the Wild Cat. Every time they had seen the red-haired boy that day he had seemed to be at work or on the run. But now, as they looked at him again, they thought better of Black Jake. At least he allowed his ship’s boy time to fish over the side.
They were about twenty yards from the Viper by that time, and John was hauling in the sheet to change course. Nobody saw exactly what happened, but there was a sudden squeak and the red-haired boy somehow shot forward off the bulwarks and dropped with a splash into the harbour.
“What a duffer!” said Nancy.
“Did someone push him in?” said Titty. “It looked like that.”
No time was wasted in thinking what to do.
“Jibe!” shouted John.
He turned Swallow round almost in her own length. The boom swung over and a moment later the little boat was shooting up into the wind close under the side of the black schooner.
“Stand by to lower sail!” said John quietly.
Close by the Swallow a tangled red mop came to the surface.
“Lower away,” called John, and Nancy and Titty brought the sail down just as John let go the tiller, leaned over and took a firm grip of the red mop.
“Yow! Yow!” squeaked the boy, spluttering and blowing as his head came above water. “Don’t you go for to pull my hair like that. And take hold of this line. It’s the only one I got. I can get aboard if you take a grip of the belt of my breeches. But let go my hair. Don’t take a hold of it again. Hoist away, now.”
“Up she raises!” said Nancy, getting a hold of the red-haired boy by the collar. Between them, she and John hoisted him in over the stern of the boat, though long afterwards he used to say he could have got in easier himself.
Titty, meanwhile, had taken the line and was coiling it in.
“Was he going to be drowned?” asked Roger, almost as if saving him had been a mistake.
“That’s all right,” said John, as the boy landed head first in the boat, soaking his rescuers with dirty water. “You’ll be aboard again in a minute.” He looked up at the steep black side of the schooner. Nobody was looking down. There was nobody there. Nobody seemed to have heard the splash or to know that they had just lost a man overboard.
“Viper, ahoy!” called John.
“Viper,
