“No she didn’t!” Case cut in. “She sunk south of the arm of the island. She’s lying there now in twenty feet of water unless I am very much mistaken. Still, we should have seen wreckage by this time.”
“Suppose we take a run up and see what the situation is there,” suggested Alex. “It would give me great joy to see a lot of those fellows marooned on that island, with nothing to eat or drink for a week.”
“We’ll only get tangled up in some kind of a mess if we go there,” Clay advised, “so I think we’d better go on down the river and see if we can’t shake off all this trouble and have a pleasant, leisurely river trip. We’ve had trouble in plenty on all our other trips, but I thought the Ohio journey would mostly consist of floating in the sunshine through cities and back yards.”
“All right!” Alex said. “I’m just as willing to get out of this mess as any one. Anyway, it will soon be daylight, and we’ll then be needing breakfast. Who does the cooking this morning?”
“We all cook,” answered Case, “for we all talk slang except Captain Joe and Teddy, and they probably have done something in that line themselves only we didn’t understand them.”
“Look here!” suggested Jule when a faint line of daylight began to show upstream. “Suppose we pull over to that wooded cove and build a roaring fire on the bank. Then we’ll send Alex out to get another catfish and bake it Indian fashion.”
“He didn’t make a success of Indian cookery on the St. Lawrence,” suggested Case. “I don’t want any foolishness about this breakfast.”
“Well,” Alex laughed, “there was something the matter with the soil over there. I guess it leaked gas or something of that kind. Anyway, the clay along the Ohio is all right.”
“Very well,” Clay said, “we’ll run into the cove and give the boy a chance to serve catfish a la Indian. The combination of gritless clay and green leaves ought to produce fine results.”
“You just watch me!” Alex insisted.