“It’s the usual boatyard you find in nearly all river towns,” added Josh; “and we ought to be able to make arrangements for having our engine looked over and repaired in the morning.”
“Make your minds easy on that score,” advised George, calmly enough; “for even if we don’t run across a machinist who can do the job, trust me to tackle it.”
“What! you?” ejaculated Buster.
“Why not?” demanded George, as though aggrieved that any one should for a moment question his ability in that line. “Haven’t I taken the engine of my Wireless to pieces many a time and put it together again?”
“That’s right, you have,” spoke up Josh, “because you never could let well enough alone, but must be monkeying around your engine all the time. That’s why Jack insisted in the beginning of this voyage that you were to be a passenger and let him act as pilot and engineer.”
“But the engine’s broken down, isn’t it?” demanded George.
“Sure it has,” Josh admitted, “but that was a sheer accident, and you didn’t have a thing to do with it.”
“There’s no reason to believe we’ll get left about finding a machinist here,” Jack remarked, to calm the troubled waters. “I think that sign tells us as much. But we’ll soon know.”
They managed to push the boat inside the enclosure. Here they found a number of river craft of various types, and Jack noticed that among them were several launches, from which fact he judged that the man did all kinds of general repairing.