I went over to his house right after breakfast, and he was at the gate waiting for me. “Careful what you say,” he told me. “Mother don’t know, and there ain’t no use frightenin’ her yet.”
“All right,” I says; “now what’s your scheme.”
“We can’t do nothin’ till we know where the turbine is and who t-t-took it. We think we know, but we got to make sure.”
“Let’s git at it, then,” I says. “What’ll we do—walk? It’s five miles.”
“I don’t want Binney and Plunk along—there’d be too many of us, and we might get caught, so we can’t git Binney’s horse.”
All of a sudden an idea hit me. The river ran right by the Willis house, and I owned a kind of a boat, flat-bottomed, but not very heavy. It was one of the kind that sort of skims over the top of the water without setting down into it much, and it was easy to row.
“What’s the matter with my boat?” I says.
“Say, that’s the very thing.”
“And I got two pairs of oars,” I told him, and most laughed out loud. Marcus Aurelius Fortunatus Tidd never cared much about exerting himself to speak of, and the idea of rowing a boat five or six miles wasn’t one he cottoned to worth a cent. He was sorry about the other pair of oars, and he showed it; but he didn’t say anything, and I knew he’d row the best he knew how when he got in the boat. If he had to work he’d work, and there wouldn’t be any soldiering. If he could get somebody else, by some scheme or other, to do his work for him he’d be tickled to death, but just to come out and loaf like some fellows do—well, he wouldn’t do it.
I kept my old boat above the dam tied up to a stake back of my uncle’s sawmill, and in ten minutes we had pushed her out into the river and were pulling up-stream, taking it easy so as not to tire ourselves all out at the start. It took us half an hour to get to Brigg’s Island. Above that the current got swifter, and we were quite a spell getting to the little island across from our cave. We went up the outside branch because the water was so shallow on our side, but we could see a little smoke going up from the place where the cave was, so we knew Sammy was home again. It’s lucky he was.