Frank Merriwell in Maine: The Lure of Way Down East

Chu! chu! chu!

The sound came from the exhaust pipe of the little steamer.

“Chew! chew chew!” grunted Bruce Browning, lazily looking up at the escaping steam. “Do you know what that makes me think of?”

“Vot?” asked Hans Dunnerwust, who did not like the glance that Browning gave him, and who felt mentally sore because he had been laughed at for trying to get sauerkraut for breakfast. “Vat vos id you makes id t’ink uf?”

“Of the time you kicked that hornet’s nest, supposing it to be a football.”

“Py shimminy, uf dot feetpall did gick me und gid stung in more as lefendeen hundret blaces, id didn’t chewed me!”

“No, but you chewed the tobacco to put on the stings, and that old exhaust pipe sounds just like Merry, when he kept saying to you, ‘Chew! chew! chew!’—and you chewed like a goat!”

“Und peen so seasick vrom id! Ach! I vish dot dose hornets hat kilt me deat ven I stinged dhem.”

“Speaking of a goat,” remarked Hodge, “I saw one aboard a while ago. It belongs to the little boy that came on the boat with the lady as we were getting our things down to the landing.”

“Shouldn’t think they’d allow a goat on the steamer,” said Diamond, in disgust. “This isn’t a stock boat.”

“No, but it looks like a lumber van,” declared Browning, glancing about the deck, where some new furniture had been stowed, destined for Capen’s, or perhaps Kineo. “I guess it carries about everything that people are willing to pay for.”

“The man who can deliberately grumble on such a morning and amid such surroundings, ‘is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils,’” declared Merriwell, looking admiringly across the water. “Tell me if any of you ever saw anything finer.”

Frank Merriwell and a party of friends were on the steamer Katahdin, out in the roomy sheet of water known as Moosehead Lake. The Katahdin had left the town of Greenville, near the southern extremity of the lake, some time before. Its ultimate destination was Kineo, the objective point of many tourists, but it was to stop at Capen’s, or Deer Isle, to put ashore some supplies there, together with Frank Merriwell’s party, consisting of Merriwell, Bart Hodge, Bruce Browning, Jack Diamond and Hans Dunnerwust, all friends of his at Yale.

They had left Greenville in a thick fog, which had at length rolled away, giving them a view of surpassing beauty. The water crinkled under the light breeze like a sea of silk. The sky was of so clear a blue that the black smoke from the little funnel trailed across it like a blotch of ink.

All round were the lake’s grassy, timbered shores. In the northwest, the brown precipice of Mount Kineo lifted its hornstone face to a height of eight hundred feet. It was named for an old Indian chief, who lived on its crest for nearly fifty years. The volcanic cone known as Spencer Peaks rose in the east, while beyond them towered the granite top of Katahdin. In the southwest was the rugged head of “Old Squaw,” named for the mother of Chief Kineo, who dwelt on its top, as her son dwelt on the top of the mountain that bears his name.