It was not much of a boat. A flat-bottomed punt, it might be called. It was square and broad at either end, not pointed in the bow and gracefully rounded in the stern, as are most boats.
“It’s a dandy boat!” cried Ted, as he worked it out. “I wish I had one like it.”
Janet looked at some muddy water in the bottom—muddy water that sloshed around under the seats.
“It leaks!” she objected. “Look at the water coming in!”
“Aw, it’s only a little,” said Teddy. “You can take off your shoes and stockings and put them on the seat, if you’re afraid of getting wet.”
“I guess I will,” Janet said, and, sitting down on the edge of the boat, she began to do this. “But maybe we’ll get so full of water we’ll sink when we get out crabbing,” she added.
“Oh, no!” her brother hastened to assure her. “I guess this is only a little water that rained in. Anyhow, if the boat was going to sink from the leaks it would be sunk now, wouldn’t it?”
“I guess so,” said Janet, slowly. “Anyhow I hope it doesn’t sink.”
“We could wade ashore if it did,” Teddy told her. “This little bay isn’t deep at all.”
He, too, took off his shoes, and when the peach basket, the crab nets and the baited lines had been put in the punt, Ted pushed off from shore with one of the oars which he found hidden in the tall grass, at a place Jimmie had told him to look for them.