“Well, if you didn’t peek it’s all right,” Freddie said. “It was a good place to hide. I waited and waited for you to come and find me and then I thought you were going to let me come on in home free, and I tried to get out. But I couldn’t—I was stuck.”
“I should say you were!” laughed Mr. Bobbsey. He could laugh now, and so could Mrs. Bobbsey, though, at first, they were very much frightened, thinking Freddie might have been hurt.
“Don’t crawl in there again, little fireman,” said one of the men with whom Mr. Bobbsey had been talking, and who knew the pet name of Flossie’s brother. “This pipe wasn’t big enough to let you fall through, but some of the ventilator pipes might be, and then you’d fall all the way through to the boiler room. Don’t hide in any more pipes on the steamer.”
“I won’t,” Freddie promised, for he had been frightened when he found that he was stuck in the pipe and couldn’t get out. “Come on, Flossie; it’s your turn to hide now,” he said.
“I don’t want to play hide-and-go-seek any more,” the little girl said. “I’d rather play with my doll.”
“If I had my fire engine I’d play fireman,” Freddie said, for he did not care much about a doll.
“How would you like to go down to the engine room with me, and see where you might have fallen if the ventilator pipe hadn’t been too small to let you through?” asked Mr. Bobbsey.
“I’d like it,” Freddie said. “I like engines.”
So his father took him away down into the hold, or lower part of the boat, and showed him where the firemen put coal on the fire. There Freddie saw ventilator pipes, like the one he had hid in, reaching from the boiler room up to the deck, so the firemen could breathe cool, fresh air. And there were also pipes like it in the engine room.
Freddie watched the shining wheels go spinning round and he heard the hiss of steam as it turned the big propeller at the back of the ship, and pushed the vessel through the waters of the deep blue sea.