Mr. Lavine tore up one of the boards under his feet in the cockpit. A man with half an eye could have seen the scum of gasoline on the bilge in the cockpit.
“Leak!” he exclaimed, wrathfully. “I should say you had been using the boat’s bottom for a gasoline tank. Why! we might have been blown up a dozen times.”
“I expect the leak’s in the feed pipe,” confessed the boatman. “But I thought I’d got her fixed las’ week.”
“You’ve got us fixed,” snapped Mr. Lavine. “’Way out here in the middle of Lake Honotonka, too–and I in a hurry.”
“Wal,” said the man, “I’ll putty up the leak and you see if you kin swab out the boat. I wouldn’t dare try and ignite her again with so much gasoline around.”
“I–should–say–not!” gasped the gentleman, and removed his coat, rolled up his sleeves and his trousers, and set to work.
They both labored like beavers for half an hour and then the boatman did the very silliest thing one can imagine. He had worked hard and, being a man addicted to tobacco, he felt the need of a smoke.
He pulled out his pipe, filled it, unnoticed by Mr. Lavine, who was still trying to swab out the last of the bilge and gasoline, and scratched a match. He was directly in front of the hood of the boat when he did it. The next moment there was a flash, a roar, and the man was flung the length of the boat, against Mr. Lavine in the stern, and the two almost went overboard.
The foolish smoker lost his mustache, eyebrows, and lashes, and a lot of his front hair. He was scorched quite severely, too; but the peril which menaced them with the front of the boat in flames drove the thought of his burns from the fellow’s mind.
“And I can’t swim a stroke, boss!” he cried.