“Isn’t there some way we can go in the tender and then pull it back to the yacht with a rope?”
“I. . . Yes. Yes, we can do that.”
“Well, you get a rope then. Snap into it.”
When he returned with a coiled line she was already in the tender with the oars, and she watched with interest while he passed the rope around a stanchion and brought both ends into the boat with him and made one of the ends fast to the ringbolt in the stem of the skiff. Then she caught the idea and she sat and paid out the line while he pulled away for shore. Soon they beached and she sprang ashore, still holding the free end of the rope. “How’re we going to keep the tender from pulling the rope back around that post and getting aloose?” she asked.
“I’ll show you,” he answered, and she watched him while he tied the oars and the rowlocks together with the free end of the line and wedged them beneath the thwarts. “That'll hold, I guess. Somebody’ll be sure to see her pretty soon,” he added, and prepared to draw the skiff back to the yacht.
“Wait a minute,” she said. She mused gravely, gazing at the dim shadowy yacht, then she borrowed matches from him, and sitting on the gunwale of the tender she tore a strip of paper from the bacon box and with a charred match printed Going to— She looked up. “Where are we going?” He looked at her and she added quickly: “I mean, what town? We'll have to go to a town somewhere, you know, to get back to New Orleans so I can get some clothes and my seventeen dollars. What’s the name of a town?”
After a while he said: “I don’t know. I never—”
“That’s right, you never were over here before, either, were you? Well, what’s that town the ferries go to? the one Jenny’s always talking about you have fun at?” She stared again at the vague shape of the Nausikaa, then she suddenly printed
