“Garsh, no!” said Swatty. “Do you think I'd go taking bath-tub baths when I didn't have to? When I visit him my uncle lets me do just what I want to. I don't have to wash my feet, or take a bath, or go for a cow, or fetch in wood—”
“Who fetches in the wood?” Bony asked.
“Nobody,” Swatty said. “My uncle don't burn sawmill slabs or cord wood. He burns coal.”
“Well, somebody has to fetch in the coal, don't he?” I wanted to know.
“Well, I guess not!” said Swatty. “He—he has a—a bridge built right over the top of his house, so he can run a railroad over it, and he has a big iron box on top of his house under the bridge, and the railroad hawrls the cars of coal right up on top of the roof and dumps the coal into the iron box, and it runs down the chimbleys right into the stove.” Well, me and Bony didn't say nothing. We just sat there and thought what we thought.
“And he's got a road scooped out under his house for a railroad to run on,” Swatty said, “and there is a train of cars under the house, and when my uncle, or anybody, shakes the grate the ashes fall right down an iron pipe into the cars.”
“Come on!” I said. “Come on! Let's go somewhere.”
So Swatty looked at me; but I hadn't said he was a liar or anything, so there was nothing to fight about. If I had wanted to I could have said I had an uncle somewhere that didn't bother with dirty old coal and ashes at all, but had his own natural gas well and used natural gas; but my nose was sore yet from the last time Swatty had pushed it into my face, so I didn't say it.
We went down to the boat-house and hired a skiff and rowed up the river to the pond-lily pond. The river was pretty low and it was muddy on the bank of the river—over knee-deep in mud. Swatty got out over the bow of the skiff to pull it up on the mud, so the wash from any steamboat would n't send it adrift, and he went in over the knees of his pants, so we thought we had better undress in the skiff, and we did. It felt bully to be undressed outdoors again.
I guess you know how the lily-pond is. On one side is the railroad and on the other side is the river; but between the pond and the river is narrow sand, with willows on it—bush willows. It makes a bank all around the lower end of the pond-lily pond and ends at the railroad. So me and Bony and Swatty talked it over, and thought we'd better not leave our clothes in the skiff, because somebody might steal them. First we thought we'd hide them in the willows, and then we thought we'd carry them around by the sand spit to the railroad, because the pond-lily roots were over by the railroad more. So we did. We walked around to the railroad and left our clothes there, and waded in. Swatty went first.