“Bad enough to have one held fast,” he said. “If the whole bunch got stuck, why, we’d have to take to the dinkies, and go ashore on Canada soil. How does your engine work, George? Nothing broken I hope?”
“I don’t think so,” came the reply from George who looked somewhat humiliated, as does every sailor when held up on a mudbank.
“Give it a try, and see. Reverse, and perhaps you’ll glide off backwards, the same way you went on,” Jack suggested.
At any rate the engine worked apparently as well as ever; but though George put it at its “best licks,” as he declared, there was not a sign of anything going.
Josh tried to use the setting pole, and came very near taking another header.
“Say, this mud goes right along down to China, I reckon; leastways there ain’t any bottom to it!” he cried, as he recovered himself just in time.
“We’ll take your word for it, Josh,” said Nick, sweetly; “because you know you’ve been over to see for yourself. But I wouldn’t try it again. Next time perhaps you might stick your head in and smother. Then what would I do for any fun at all?”
George kept trying every way he could think of, in the effort to work his boat off the bank of sticky mud. It was in vain. Apparently many unseen hands held it tight, as though unwilling to let the reckless skipper have another chance.
When an hour had passed, with several false alarms, as George thought success was coming, he turned to Jack with a blank face, upon which disgust was plainly written.
“You’ll have to get me out of this, commodore,” he said. “I own up that I don’t seem able to budge her a bit. Even with Josh in the dinky, pulling like all get-out, and her engine rattling away at full speed astern, she won’t move an inch. And already we’ve lost enough time to make it impossible to get to the Soo by night.”