“I’ll be satisfied,” Peg spoke up in his sensible way, “if we make a hundred dollars … twenty-five dollars apiece. I’ve been wanting a bicycle.”
“You and me both,” I put in.
“Well,” grinned Scoop, “it’s a bit unlikely that we’ll get to be millionaires. Still, you never can tell.” [[10]]
CHAPTER II
THE ENEMY
Before I go any deeper into my story I will tell you about our canal, for you will need this information to thoroughly understand what follows.
We call it the Tutter canal, for the reason that it runs through our small town. Over in Ashton, a neighboring small town, the kids call it the Ashton canal. It is a hundred miles long, I guess. Maybe longer. It was built by the state to connect the great lakes with the Gulf of Mexico through the Illinois River and the Mississippi River.
It isn’t more than forty feet wide where it passes through Tutter. One bank forms a tow path, which was necessary when the canal was new because in those olden days all of the grain boats were drawn by horses and mules. To-day the few boats that come through Tutter are drawn by smoky tugs.
In the same way that a single-track railroad has [[11]]sidings that permit trains traveling in opposite directions to pass each other, our canal has “wide waters,” where the canal boats meet and pass. There is a wide waters below Tutter and another one between our town and Ashton. The biggest wide waters that I have seen is the one between Ashton and Steam Corners. Here the canal is more than a mile wide, a sort of lake, though the water for the most part is shallow, with a mud bottom. The channel is marked with parallel rows of piles painted white.