“If your pa’ll let us use it,” he said to me, with an ear-to-ear grin, “I know how we can earn some money with it.”
Well, that sounded darby. For boys like to earn money. And if we could have fun doing it, as seemed very probable, so much the better.
Then Peg told us that it was his scheme to get up a boat show, patterned after the boat shows that used to travel on the Mississippi River years ago, only, of course, our show was to be a small one as compared to the early river shows. We could easily make the audience seats, our chum explained in reciting his scheme, and build a stage at one end of the boat.
Red wanted to give a picture show.
“I’ve got a peachy moving picture machine,” he told us. [[3]]
“What’s the matter with our black art show?” Scoop suggested.
“The black art show,” Peg said, waggling, “is what I had in mind.”
“Oh, baby!” I cried. “Won’t we have fun?”
Scoop had been studying sleight of hand tricks and his book of instructions told how to stage an amateur black art show. Black art is a good magic trick. Anybody can do it, as I will explain later on in my story. In June we put on the show in Red’s barn. It was fun. We took in ninety-five cents, which was pretty good for the first time. If Peg, the big cow, hadn’t stumbled over a lantern, thereby setting fire to one of Mrs. Meyers’ sheets that we were using on the stage, we probably would have made a lot of money giving black art shows. But we had to go out of the show business when Mr. Meyers put a padlock on the barn door.
Now we were going to be showmen again! We were glad. The more we talked about the boat show scheme the better we liked it. In the first place it was different. People who had laughed at our barn show, calling it a kid affair, would be interested in our boat show. And we wouldn’t have any competition, because we would be the owners of the only flat-bottomed boat in town. [[4]]Other boys might envy us, but they wouldn’t be able to take any of our business away from us by starting a rival boat show. Certain of success, we were eager to begin. But first I had to gain Dad’s consent.