“How much would you charge?”
“Fifty cents,” replied Toby promptly. “Do you think that’s too much? I could make a round trip rate of seventy-five, maybe.”
“No, fifty cents isn’t much for a three-mile trip. How often would you make it?”
“Four times a day, twice in the morning and twice in the afternoon. I could leave here at nine, say, and come back at ten. Then I could go over again at eleven, two, and four. Even if I carried only four passengers a day it would be two dollars, and that would make twelve dollars a week. And there’s twelve weeks yet, and that would be a hundred and forty-four dollars!”
“You’ve got to think about gas and oil, though, Toby.”
“That’s so! Well, gas would cost me about twenty cents a day, and oil—say, five, although it wouldn’t come to so much. That would make it a dollar and seventy-five cents instead of two, wouldn’t it? How much would I have at the end of the summer?”
Arnold did some mental arithmetic and announced the result as a hundred and twenty-six dollars. “But you’d ought to get more than four passengers a day, Toby, after folks heard about it. You could put up notices, couldn’t you?”
“Yes, and I’d have a sign on the landing, and——” he paused and frowned. “I wonder if they’d make me pay for using the town landing. They might, you know.”