“What a campaign orator she would have made!” laughed Clay. “But, suppose we find the money before we look over the map.”
The motor boat Rambler lay in a secluded warehouse slip in the South Branch, as the southwestern arm of the Chicago river is called, and the three hungry boys referred to and one other, Julian Shafer, the lad the others were now anxious about, constituted her crew and passenger list, all in one. Clay, Alex and Case were busy with supper arrangements, as stated, and all were listening for the approach of Jule.
The cabin, which was seven feet by nine, did not seem quite like home without him. The rain, which had come on with the going down of the sun, drove in spiteful gusts from the southwest, so that the two foot-square windows on that side were closed, but from the open casements to the north the odor of sizzling sausage and bubbling coffee traveled out on the wet winds of the April evening.
Many who passed the head of the driveway which led down to the warehouse and the pier where the Rambler lay stopped to sniff the fragrant reminder of what the world owes to its stomach, and to look in wonder at the odd little residence on the brown river.
A patrolman, rustling along in a rubber coat which came down to his great heels, swinging his nightstick petulantly, as if in protest of the storm, drew up at the entrance to the private way and glanced down at the boat and stood for an instant imagining how a good cup of that coffee would taste!
It was while he stood there that the door was opened, and it was while the light from the interior lay over the pier and warehouse that the officer thought he saw a slim figure skulking in an angle of the building. When he reached the place where the figure had stood, the light was gone and the angle was empty, with the rain beating against it in a particularly determined manner. So the policeman went on about his business.
The Rambler had lain in the slip by the warehouse all through the winter, and the boys had called her cabin, which was so low that they could stand upright only in the center, their “furnished, steam-heated apartments,” being careful to speak of it in the plural. She was a trim little craft, twenty feet by seven over all, with the cabin extending over almost half of the interior of the shell, lengthwise.
The cabin was a strongly-built structure, with two foot-square windows on each side and one looking out at the stern, where a platform four feet by the width of the boat formed a floor for chairs, and also a covering for the gasoline tanks underneath. The front deck extended to the prow, the powerful motors and other machinery being mostly under it, near the middle of the craft, just in front of the cabin door. Under this deck, forward of the motors and apparatus for supplying electricity, were storage spaces for provisions and gasoline.
As has, perhaps, been gathered from the conversation engaged in by the occupants of the cabin on this night, the boys had arranged to take their winter “bachelor hall” out on a long journey during the summer. They were now ready to start on the trip they had long planned—no less an undertaking than a motor boat journey to the headwaters of the Amazon! In fact, the boat was already stocked with provisions, and the gasoline was to be taken on the next day.
The boys were all orphans, so far as they knew, having been in the first instance brought together by their homelessness. They had been reared in the streets of the city, selling newspapers and running errands and doing such odd jobs as boys can turn hand to. Often, when very young, they had slept together in hallways and in boxes in alleys. When arrived at the age of fourteen, they had secured employment in printing offices, and had of their own volition become regular attendants at night schools.