The fellows opened the bridge for General Grant to go through and Captain Savage let me out on one of the cross-beams, without even stopping. He didn’t even look at the fellows as the tug went through, only looked straight ahead of him and puffed away on his pipe, as if he didn’t even know that there were such things as scouts. We just stood there watching the tug churning up the water, as she went faster and faster until she was gone around the bend.
“He’s a kind of an old grouch,” Pee-wee said.
“It’s good you happened to think about how he used that word desert,” Doc said.
Then Connie said he wouldn’t want to be his son and Artie said he wouldn’t want to be around the house with him on a rainy Sunday, and I let them go on knocking him, until they got good and tired and then I said,
“Do you know what he wants to do?”
“I bet he wants us to go and be witnesses against Uncle Jimmy,” Pee-wee said; “he’ll never get me to be a witness, you can bet.”
“Wrong the first time, as usual,” I said; “he wants to tow the house-boat up as far as Poughkeepsie for us next week.”
Well, you should have seen those fellows.
“What did you tell him?” Pee-wee yelled.
“I told him that I was sorry, but that scouts couldn’t accept anything for a service—not even favors.”