“’Possums, coons, rabbits and squirrels.”
“All right, we’ll go right now and get a coon.”
Cornelius Witters threw himself back on the gunwale and laughed and shook until little wavelets sprang from the sides of the boat and rippled away over the Ohio river.
“You’ll get lots of coons in the middle of the afternoon,” he said, finally. “You have to get coons in the night.”
“Well, there’s another night coming, ain’t there?” suggested Alex Smithwick. “We’re going to stay here in this eddy until morning, ain’t we?”
“I guess we’ll have to stay till morning,” Jule Shafer cut in. “The motor has gone wrong, and Clay doesn’t seem to know how to fix it.”
Clayton Emmett looked up from the motors with a very smutty face and smiled at the last remark.
“I’ll tell you what it is, boys,” he said, “this motor can’t be put in good shape until we get another consignment of spark plugs.”
The four boys, Clayton Emmett, Alex Smithwick, Jule Shafer and Cornelius Witters, gathered about the motor, looking with disgust at its motionless cranks. The boat had been turned into an eddy on the Kentucky side of the Ohio river about noon, and Clay had been working at the machinery ever since in the hope of getting farther down the river that night.
“Well,” Case said, after a short silence, “some one must go out to civilization and buy some spark plugs. How far do you think we’ll have to go? Of course these little trading points on the river don’t keep spark plugs. We’ll be lucky if we even get gasoline there.”