For a while Buddy steered energetically, splashing the water with the blade of his oar, but Peter was ready for the first sign of weariness.
“My! but you are a fine steerer!” he said approvingly. “When you grow just a bit bigger, Uncle Peter is going to teach you how to row a boat, and a song to sing while you row it. Hurry up, now, and help Uncle Peter steer.”
“Let's sing a song to steer a boat,” said Buddy.
“No, I guess we won't sing to-day,” said Peter. “Some other day we'll sing.”
For Peter and Buddy were not taking the voyage alone. When Peter, assisted by Mrs. Skinner, had completed the preparations he felt were due any woman who is making the Great Journey, he found his money too little to afford her a resting-place in the town, but Peter Lane could not let one who had knocked at his door, seeking shelter, go from there to the potter's field, any more than he could let her boy go to the county farm. While the smart reporter was wondering whether the power of the press, in his article “Pass Her Along,” had warned Lize Merdin to take the road to some other town, and while Dr. Roth was telling of the shanty-boatman whose wife had died without medical attendance, Peter, by roundabout questions regarding George Rapp's place, learned of a small country burying ground not too far from the spot where the shanty-boat was to be moored for the winter. There he was taking Lize Merdin who, “decent” at last and forever, lay within the cabin.
Through the long forenoon Peter leaned on the handle of his sweep, pressing his breast against it now and then to swing the shanty-boat into the full current. There was no other large boat on the river. Here and there a fisherman pulled at his oars in a heavy skiff, or moved slowly from hook to hook of his trot-line, lifting from time to time a flop-pily protesting fish, but gave the shanty-boat no more than a glance.
The boat floated past the empty log-boom of the upper mill—silent for the winter—and past the great lumber piles, still bearing their covering of sleet. Peter could hear the gun-like slap of board on board coming from where some man was loading lumber in a freight car, and occasionally a voice came across the water with startling distinctness:
“I told him he could chop his own wood, I wouldn't do it.”
“What did he say to that?”
“He said he could get plenty of men that would do it.” He knew the men must be sitting close to the water's edge, and finally his sharp eyes made them out below the railway embankment—two black specks crouched over a small, yellow blaze. He recognized one voice, the voice of one of the town loafers. The other was strange to him, probably that of some tramp.