The Boy Ranchers of Puget Sound — Edition Insights

Frank did as the boy directed. Then the helmsman waved his hand.

"Not too flat! Belay at that! Get down here aft, both of you!"

Frank staggered aft a pace or two, and sitting down breathless and dripping gazed about him. The boat looked a good deal bigger than she had appeared from the steamer, and, as a matter of fact, she was a half-decked sloop of about twenty-four feet in length. Just then she was slanted well down on one side, with the water foaming along her depressed deck and showers of spray beating into her over her weather bow, while the jib above her bowsprit every now and then plunged into the short, white-topped seas. There seemed to be some water inside her, for it washed up above the floorings at every heave. In a few moments Frank had recovered his breath sufficiently to look around at his companions. One was a boy of about his own age who smiled at him. He had a bronzed skin and a kindly expression, and looked lean and wiry.

"You're Frank Whitney?" asked the boy.

Frank acknowledged that this was his name, and the other proceeded to introduce himself and his companion.

"I'm Harry Oliver, and, as you're going to stay with us, we've got to hit it off together."

Then he turned and indicated the ruddy-faced, red-haired man who held the helm.

"This is Jake, one of the smartest choppers and trailers on the Pacific Slope. There aren't many of the boys who could have picked you off that steamboat in a breeze of wind as he did."

"Oh, pshaw!" said the helmsman with a grin.

Neither of them had said anything striking in the way of welcome, but Frank felt quickly at ease with them. As a rule, the new acquaintances he had made in business farther east seemed to expect him to recognize their superiority, or, at least, to understand that it was a privilege to be admitted into their society. His present companions, however, somehow made it plain that as long as he was willing to be commonly civil there was no reason why they should not get on well together, for which he was thankful, though he felt that any attempt to put on airs with them would probably lead to trouble.

"How far is it to your father's ranch?" he asked presently.

"Twelve miles," responded Harry. "With a head wind like this one, it means from eighteen to twenty-four miles' sailing. It depends, for one thing, on Jake's steering."

"Thirty, sure," broke in the helmsman, "if you had the tiller."

"How's that?" asked Frank.

"Know anything about sailing?"

Frank confessed his ignorance, and Jake nodded to Harry.

"Show him," he said. "He has got to learn and you can teach the fellow who'll allow he doesn't know anything. The kind we've no use for is the one that knows too much."

Harry laid a wet finger on the hove-up weather deck.

"Now," he began, "a boat or a ship under sail can go straight to the place she's bound for as long as she has the wind anywhere from right behind her to a little forward on her side. In fact, as she'll lie up within a few points of the wind, there's only a small segment of the circle you can't sail her straight into."

He traced a circle on the deck and then placed his finger over about a quarter of the circumference of it.

"She won't go there."

"But supposing you want to?"

"Then, if the wind's ahead, you have to beat." He drew two lines across the circle at right angles to each other and laid his finger at the end of one. "Say we're here at north and the cove we're going to lies about south. Well, you get your sheets in flat--same as we have them now--and you sail up this way, at this angle to the wind." He ran a slanting line across the circle until it touched the rim. "That brings you here; then you come round, and go off at the same angle on the opposite tack, which brings you right up to the cove. You can do it in two long tacks, or--and it's the same thing--in a lot of little ones, each at the same angle to the wind; but how many degrees there are in that angle and when you get there depends on how your sails are cut and how smart you are at steering her."

Frank understood the gist of it, but there were one or two difficulties, and he was not ashamed to ask a question:

"What makes her go slantways against the wind? Why doesn't it blow her back, or sideways?"