“This is the workroom,” explained the host. “Not lavishly furnished, you see.”
No one answered. What they were all wondering was, how on earth the man managed to move around in that tiny room without upsetting the easel or the table! Perhaps he surmised their thoughts, for:
“Rather a small den for a big bear, isn’t it?” he laughed, showing a set of big white teeth through his beard.
“It’s very nice,” murmured Harry. “Do you make pictures?”
“Yes, I’m a painter,” he answered, as he opened another door.
“Told you he was!” whispered Chub to Roy, and received a scathing glance in reply.
Out of the living-room was a tiny kitchen with an oil-stove, cupboards for dishes and food, a sink, and, in short, all the requirements for housekeeping. Harry went into raptures over the place, and the boys agreed that it was “just about all right.” On the other side of the kitchen, or the “galley,” as their host termed it, was a small engine-room with a twenty horse-power gasolene engine. That interested Dick, and he had to know all about it before he would consent to go on. The man explained smilingly, obligingly.
“It’s a fairish engine, I guess,” he said, “but I’m free to confess that I don’t understand it and never shall. Engines and machinery are beyond me. I start it going and if it wants to it keeps on. If it doesn’t want to it stops. And I stay there until it gets ready to go again. It’s stopped now, as it happens. That’s why I’m here.”
From the engine-room he conducted them on deck and then through a door near the bow. Here was a narrow entry crossing the boat, opening on one side into a bedroom and on the other into a sitting-room. The bedroom was simply and comfortably furnished and had a real brass bedstead in it. The sitting-room was very cozy and inviting, and was the largest room of all. There were two windows on each side and one looking over the bow. A queer circular iron stairway popped straight upward to the pilot-house above. There was a window-seat along the front containing some comfortable leather cushions—the sort a fellow isn’t afraid of soiling—a table in the center, three comfortable chairs, a bookcase half full of volumes and holding a bowl of geraniums, a talking-machine which pointed its horn threateningly toward the front window as though ready to be fired at any moment, and, to Harry’s delighted approval, a big, gray Angora cat asleep on the window-seat.