All at once, I felt my cap pushed right off, and I looked up and there was a boy, riding on the top of an old gray mule, that was one of two tired-looking mules, dragging a canal boat.
There was nobody on the boat that I could see, 'cept one man asleep on the top.
"Gimme my cap, boy," I said.
"Aw, you and your fishin'," he says. "Git off the towpath."
And I said: "You can't say that to me. We've got the right of way here, because I live in that house with the green door."
"Oh, you do," says he. "Well, baby dear, go in and tell yer wimmin folks ye've lost your cap"; and he chucked my cap right into the canal!
Well, I couldn't get it, without falling in, and there was the canal-boat coming along ready to run over it. So I took my fishing-rod and flicked it at him, and there—I had caught the eel after all! It struck him, all cold and slippery, and he yelled, and it hit the mule, and the mule ran away, dragging the other mule with it, right up the slope to Rabbit Run Bridge!
The boy had grabbed the fishing-rod, so that my rod and my eel went with them.
My! but I was mad, but kind of excited, too, for a man came up from the inside of the canal boat and yelled, and the man on the deck woke up and yelled, and the boy was yelling!