"I don't believe he is going back on father," replied Deck, when the manager had disappeared and the boat had reached the bend. "Here we are; we can't see the bridge now, and the bridge can't see us."
"We will stop if you say so; but we may not get back to the house before to-morrow morning if we spend much time here," said Artie, as he rested on his oar, and seemed to be very unwilling to use any of the time in mere talk.
"If the time is so short, why didn't you start out this morning? and why didn't you let me know sooner that you were going to set the creek on fire? We might have brought our dinners with us, as we did when we went to school in Derry, and made a day of it," argued Deck.
"Things were not ready this morning, and I started just as soon as I saw the star in the east," replied Artie.
"You don't generally wait for the grass to grow under your feet when the lightning strikes near you."
"The lightning struck while we were at dinner," added Artie quietly.
"But I think we can fix things so that we can talk and keep moving at the same time," suggested Deck, as he rose from his seat with his oar in his hand, and stepped over his thwart to the aftermost one.
He seated himself on this thwart, facing the bow. The boys were not skilled boatmen, though they had practised rowing a good deal on the river and creek, and they had not trimmed the light craft to the best advantage for ease and speed, for it was down too much by the head. Deck asked his cousin to move one seat farther aft, and he complied readily, in spite of the fact that he was the more skilled of the two in rowing. In the smallest of the three boats at the lower pier he had often made long trips alone up the creek, besides those when his cousin was his companion.
"That lifts the bow higher out of the water," said Artie as he took his place.
"So much the better," replied Deck, proceeding to give philosophical and scientific reasons to explain what experienced boatmen know by instinct, as it were. "Now take the stroke from me, and don't pull any faster than I do."