“Watch your job,” I laughed, giving the tiller a jerk. “You almost ran us into the bank.”
“Let’s try backing up,” suggested Scoop.
Red pushed the lever into “reverse.” Slowly the Sally Ann came to a stop, then began to back up.
“Shove her into ‘forward,’ ” Scoop directed, “and we’ll take a trip down the canal.”
We went about a mile. Several times the engine stuttered and gagged, but that was nothing to worry about, Red said. Coming home we had to back up, for there wasn’t enough room in the canal for us to turn around. But to us the backing up was just as much fun as going ahead. We told ourselves that we were pretty smart. Not many boys our age could have done a job like this. And what did we care if it took us an hour to go a couple of miles? The Sally Ann was moving under her own power, and that was the main thing. We would have no trouble getting over to Ashton and back. The county seat was separated [[52]]from Tutter by only a few miles. We could make an all-day trip of it, if necessary. A thing we weren’t short of was time.
To save ourselves the tiresome work of cranking the hand organ, we made a wooden pulley, to take the place of the crank, and ran a belt from the pulley to the engine. By speeding the engine we could make “The Old Oaken Bucket” sound like a jazzy fox trot.
It was now well along toward suppertime. So Scoop remained at the boat while the rest of us went home to eat. That night Peg and I stood guard, sleeping turn about. But there was no disturbance throughout the night. We saw nothing of either the whispering ghost or the tricky Stricker gang.
Scoop relieved us at six o’clock. And after breakfast the leader and I went to the Daily Globe office to order our tickets.
These would be ready for us at noon, we were told, and would cost us a dollar.
“Maybe,” Scoop said to the editor, giving me a nudge, “you’d like to have some more news about our show.”