twice as long as usual. All that he hoped was that his father or Dr. Cobb had happened to see the accident; one of them might be nearer. He couldn’t tell what was going on now that the fishhouse was beginning to block his view, but suddenly he heard feet running down the wharf. Then he was tearing around the building himself and racing out to the float. Ripples warned him that the other person had dived in, and he checked himself a second to take a hasty look. There was no sense in fouling things up by landing on somebody’s back, but there was not even a shadow under him. Kicking off his shoes, he went over in a long dive.
To the right, a little below him, someone was struggling to pull Waity loose from the piling, and Steve went down fast to help. Catching the unconscious man under the arms, he shoved him forward so his wedged foot could be freed. Then, with Waity supported between them, the pair of rescuers shot to the surface. Brawny arms thrust an oar within Steve’s grasp, and Captain Purchas hauled them alongside the float where he and Dr. Cobb lifted Waity out and began to work over him.
Steve started to turn to see if his companion needed help, but his mother was ahead of him, her hand already outstretched, and he climbed out on the float to sit there panting. The other person flopped, dripping, beside him.
“I’m Linda Cobb,” she said between gasps. “I guess you’re Steve Purchas. Hi!”
2 • Trouble Off Haddock
STEVE stared at the girl on the float as if some weird fish with a couple of tails had suddenly landed beside him. This was not the kind of Miss Cobb he had been expecting to meet. Somewhere along the line, the Purchases had got it into their heads that Linda Cobb was near his brother Tom’s age, and Tom was through college, married, and in the Navy. Steve tried hastily to figure out where they had gone wrong. On his flying visits to the Point, Dr. Cobb had never had occasion to talk much about his own affairs. All he had said was that he was a widower and that his daughter would be coming along with him to keep house and do some painting. It was that housekeeping business that had thrown them off, Steve realized. He started pulling himself together. Even waterlogged, Linda Cobb was easy to take, but by now she probably thought he had been born with his eyes out on stilts like a lobster.
Linda chuckled at his expression. “Don’t bother trying to explain,” she said. “It’s all Dad’s fault. Your mother told me he pulled me out of his hat without any vital statistics. He’s always doing it. Last summer our landlord had a playpen for me!”
Steve grinned and gave her a hand up. At least, she had a sense of humor. But with Waity on their minds, they had no time for casual conversation, and they stood, watching anxiously as Dr. Cobb continued artificial respiration. Captain Pel, though, looked up long enough to be encouraging.
“He’s coming around,” he said comfortably. “Stirred some a minute ago. You two go get dry. And step on it, will you, Steve? You’ll have to drive over to the Neck for Dr. Littlefield. We’d better play safe.”
He turned his attention back to Waity, and Steve dashed off with a muttered apology to Linda for his desertion. Throwing on dry clothes didn’t take long. Linda was just disappearing through the Cobbs’ front door when he slid under the wheel of the car and headed off the Point. But it was nearly six-thirty before he located a supperless Dr. Littlefield out on a call, and piloted the Ford home again, the doctor in his own car close behind him.
“Waity was on the landing float when I left,” Steve said as they climbed out in front of the house. “Maybe we’d better go down there.”
But his mother, on the lookout at the door, beckoned to them. “This way, Doctor,” she called. “Waity’s rolled up in blankets on the living-room couch. He seems pretty comfortable. And, Steve, Dad says you’d better get those crates on the float under shelter for the night. The wind’s shifting.”
She followed the doctor into the house, and Steve went reluctantly back to the landing. At the moment, he would have been willing to call it a day without hauling a batch of heavy crates up a gangplank and along a wharf to a fishhouse. The job was finished eventually, however, and he whistled his way to the house once more, his mind fixed on his belated supper until he spotted the doctor’s car still parked where they had left it. Then he took the porch steps two at a time and bolted through the hall into the living room. There was always the chance that Waity had been injured more seriously than anyone supposed.
But Waity was obviously doing fine in spite of the huge goose egg on the back of his head and the quantity of salt water that had been rolled out of him. Propped against the pillows of the couch, he was busy with a bowl of hot soup while the rest of them ate supper at a table pulled over in front of the fire. Steve tackled his own chowder, smiling with relief.
“Whew,” he said. “For a minute there, I thought Dr. Littlefield had turned up a couple of broken ribs and a punctured lung.”
The doctor laughed. “You can stop worrying, son. The patient’ll live. Just concentrate on this supper while it’s hot.”
Actually, his only real concern was over the foot that Waity had caught in the piling. It was too swollen and discolored for the doctor to be sure no bones were broken, and he insisted Waity stay off it until he could drive him to Brunswick next morning for an X ray.
“You can cart him home and get him into his own bed,” he told the Purchases as he got ready to leave after supper. “I’ll send Abby Beamish along to take care of him.” Then he smiled broadly at Waity’s outraged growl. “Oh, all right, have Steve if you’d rather. Only keep off that foot, Wait Webber, or I refuse to be responsible.”
Smothering a laugh, Steve strolled off to collect his pajamas and toothbrush. Offhand, he couldn’t think of any occasion when Abby Beamish and Wait Webber had seen eye to eye. Besides, the idea of a woman bustling around his house would raise Waity’s blood pressure to an all-time high. As Harpswell’s most determined bachelor, he lived alone and liked it. Steve, with an increased respect for the medical profession, helped his father carry him out to the car. Between satisfaction at escaping Abby and the sedatives administered for the pain in his ankle, Wait was obeying orders with abnormal meekness.
Steve took a quick look as they passed his grandfather’s old house, but there were no Cobbs in sight. He had been at the landing moving crates when they stopped to inquire for Waity, and he had yet to see Linda without her hair plastered to her head and water dripping off her nose. But from where he sat, Linda Cobb was not hard on the eyes, wet or dry, and since she had turned out to be seventeen, the summer could have been rough if she had shown up looking like a sculpin.
The weather next morning was not calculated to lure anyone outside his own door, and there was still no sign of Linda when Steve tramped back to Juniper Point. It was already after ten o’clock. A southeaster in the night had stirred up a kettle of pea soup that made the foghorn on Halfway Rock Light wail like a banshee, and with visibility beyond ten feet absolutely nil, Dr. Littlefield had been understandably slow getting around to Ash Point to pick up his patient. Steve stopped at the house just long enough to leave his pajamas and to answer his mother’s questions. Then he strode on to Purchas Landing. He still had to finish the unloading job that the accident had interrupted.
The Maquoit, tied up at the float the way Waity had left her, looked like a boat daubed on a backdrop that somebody had forgotten to fill in with scenery. As he climbed aboard to open up her hatch and clear her winch, Steve could hear his father’s power saw whining through planks in the boatshop at the head of the cove, but for all he could see, the shop might have been at the bottom of Casco Bay. It was certainly no day for pleasure cruising. He swung the winch arm montonously back and forth, picking up crates and dumping them on the float until he had emptied the Maquoit’s hold and could begin to haul
