"Now, you are getting scared, professor," laughed Frank, lifting his paddle from the water and laying it across the bow of the canoe. "I'll tell you what we'll do."
"All right."
"We'll leave it to Barney, who has not had a word to say on the matter. If he says go back, we'll go back."
Professor Scotch hesitated, scratched his fingers into his fiery beard, and then said:
"Well, I'll have to do as you boys say, anyway, so we'll leave it to Barney."
"All right," laughed Frank, once more. "What do you say, Barney, my boy?"
Barney Mulloy was in the stern of the canoe that had been creeping along one of the sluggish water courses that led through the cypress swamp and into the heart of the Everglades.
"Well, gintlemin," he said, "Oi've been so busy thrying to kape thrack av th' twists an' turruns we have been makin' thot Oi didn't moind mutch pwhat ye wur soaying. It wur something about turning back. Plaze repate it again."
So the matter was laid before him, and, when he had heard what Frank and the professor had to say, he declared:
"Fer mesilf it's nivver a bit do Oi care where we go ur pwhat we do, but, as long as we hiv come so fur, an' Frankie wants to go furder, Oi'd soay go on till he is sick av it an' reddy to turn back."