As the moments wore on, Skippy felt meaner than ever. He tried to force himself to accept Big Joe’s point of view, but it was difficult and more than once he wished he had not encouraged his good friend in this dubious enterprise.

They chugged into the bay and out of the awakening river traffic. Dawn had broken through and glimmerings of dancing light peeped over the horizon. An hour more and they would be in sight of Watson’s Channel.

“We’ll not be goin’ straight for the Channel, we’ll not,” called Big Joe as if anticipating Skippy’s fears. “We’ll be layin’ quite like below here a ways ’till the Minnehaha gets in the Channel. ’Tis a funny name, hey kid?”

“Mm,” Skippy answered. “It’s a Indian name, Big Joe—I think it means sumpin’ like Laughing—Laughing sumpin’.”

Big Joe’s mirth knew no bounds.
140

“Sure and just about now Minnie ain’t laughin’, she ain’t,” he said. “’Tis us.”

“Not me,” Skippy said gloomily. “I won’t laugh ... not till after.”

An hour later they were chugging noisily toward Watson’s Channel. The sun was glorious and the water glistened under its warm spring rays. Gulls frolicked about in the foaming spray and Skippy tried hard to believe there was nothing but peace in his busy mind.

After a time they heard a distant sound, faint at first but growing louder within a few minutes. Tully grinned at Skippy’s questioning face and nodded as the piercing note of a siren cut the silent sunlit air.

“Sure, and I wonder what that might be?” he said with mock-seriousness. “Sounds like distress I’d be sayin’, I would.”

“Stop kiddin’, Big Joe,” Skippy pleaded. “You mean you think it’s them?”

“Well now I wouldn’ be s’prised,” the big fellow answered. Then seriously, he said: “We’ll be gettin’ there, kid! Don’t be lookin’ as if they was drownin’ or somethin’. Sure they could keep afloat for hours so they could, and look at the tide besides.”
141

Skippy glanced at the quietly rolling swell and felt somewhat reassured. But the voice of the siren jarred him and he was glad to see that Big Joe looked serious and determined. He hadn’t liked that note of raillery in his friend’s voice.

But despite Skippy’s fears Tully answered the siren call with all the haste of a good Samaritan. One might have supposed that he gloried in the duties of heroic service. And when he reached the Channel and they sighted the distressed launch, he opened wide his throttle until the old hull shook to the vibrations of the engine.

Skippy clenched his slim, brown fingers and sat tense in his seat while a spray rained into the boat. Big Joe coughed significantly and drove his ramshackle craft straight for the disabled cruiser.

“Now ain’t she the sweet lookin’ baby,” he observed as if he had never seen the launch before.

Skippy said nothing but grimly watched the three men who awaited their coming. Crosley he recognized at once, but the man standing alongside of him was a stranger. The third occupant of the Minnehaha was Marty Skinner. Skippy remembered him from his father’s trial and from the night Skinner had ordered him off the Apollyon without a hearing.
142

“You see him?” he asked Big Joe between clenched teeth.

“’Tis all the better,” Big Joe seemed to say in his bland smile.

He brought the kicker up alongside the Minnehaha and laid a life preserver over the coaming of his boat to prevent its scratching the gleaming hull of the launch. Skippy scrambled to the rescue and held the kicker as the ill-assorted pair rocked and rubbed in the heavy swell.

“Sure I don’t want to be scratchin’ her,” said Tully with a fine assumption of humble respect for the launch. “I was tellin’ the kid here, she’s some baby, hey? What’s bein’ the matter; power give out did she? ’Tis too bad, so ’tis.”

Skippy kept his eyes on space, but he had the feeling that Big Joe and he were being scrutinized with unfriendly stares.

Crosley sniffed the air contemptuously before he spoke.

“She’s pumping oil to beat the band,” he said. “We don’t seem to be getting any compression either. We can’t get a kick out of her. Been flopping around for an hour.”

“Sure maybe ye be needin’ new rings,” said Tully. “Guess ye been pushin’ her too hard, hey?”
143

He glanced into the cockpit and with a fine show of rueful astonishment, beheld the disastrous results of his own handiwork. She was indeed pumping oil. The engine head was covered with it, and it was streaming down the side over the carburetor. Three or four spark plugs had been taken out and lay on a locker in little puddles of oozy muck.

“If ’t was only one cylinder now, I’d be sayin’ ye had a busted ring, or even a cracked piston,” ............