“Seems to me,” said Dick, “I’m in for a lot of work. When I signed for this trip I didn’t know I was to be engineer and cook, too.”
“Oh, yes, you did, Dickums. You knew it, but you didn’t realize it.”
“Well, then, you fellows needn’t complain if you don’t get all your meals on time,” answered Dick, morosely.
“No, we won’t complain; we’ll simply throw you overboard. But I think Roy had better take lessons in engineering so that you can have your Thursday afternoons off. Dickums, take him down with you now and give him his first lesson.”
“I want to steer for a while,” said Roy. But Chub shook his head.
“I don’t feel that I can trust you,” he answered. “With all these young lives depending on careful navigation—”
The others howled.
“Considering that you hit everything in sight when we started out,” said Roy, “you’d better—” Chub viewed them scowlingly.
“This sounds to me like mutiny,” he muttered. “Kindly put yourselves in irons.”
Roy spent the next half hour studying “Somes on the Gas-Engine.” Toward six o’clock the Slow Poke chugged across to the Jersey shore and after some discussion a place was selected for anchorage. There was a break here in the rocky wall of the Palisades and a little stream meandered down through a tiny valley. The woods came closely to the river’s edge, and after getting the Slow Poke as near shore as her draft would permit, they carried lines from stern and bow and made them fast to trees. Then all hands set to to prepare supper. Chub established himself on the railing of the after deck and pared potatoes, pausing in his task whenever a boat went up or down the river.