“Coot Brewer!” he cried, “if ever you take anybody in a boat again from this place, I’ll have you horsewhipped!”
Coot sat down, and smiled a languid smile.
“You don’t ketch me takin’ out city chaps like them,” he said. “They draws ’gators.”
At this another shout of laughter arose.
“You dunderhead!” cried the colonel. “Don’t you know that if you’d fired at them, every ’gator would have skedaddled?”
“Yes,” said Coot, “a-carryin’ off us fellers in their jaws.”
Scolding and derision had very little effect on the brother of John Brewer. The colonel roared out his strongest condemnation of Coot’s conduct in deserting the boys, and everybody laughed at him for being afraid of the alligators, but the placid Coot smiled through it all. He had got safely away from the ’gators in Lowper’s Creek, and he did not care what happened now.
Just before supper, there was another arrival in the town. This was the yacht containing the family-party which the boys had seen on Indian River.
They came up to the hotel in a little procession, with their bundles, their valises, their baskets, their umbrellas, their fishing-rods, their canes they had cut, the little alligators they were carrying home in boxes, the shells they had picked up, and all the curious things they had gathered on their trip.
The colonel sat, with an austere countenance, and watched them approaching. They had not stopped in Titusville when they passed through before, having gone directly on board the boat, which they had engaged by letter, and it soon appeared that they did not intend to stop now.