Oddly, perhaps, they hadn’t considered the question before. But Laurie answered quite promptly, “Two dollars.”
“All right,” was the equally prompt reply. “Jump in!”
Two minutes later the launch was chugging out into the stream, Laurie and Bob huddled in the stern seat, with the water rippling past a scant four inches below the gunwale. The craft was rather an amazing affair, being not more than fourteen feet in length and apparently built of odds and ends. No two planks seemed the same width, while, as for length, they were anywhere from two feet to ten. Water trickled in from innumerable seams. The engine was a diminutive thing of one cylinder, with a fly-wheel scarcely larger than a good-sized dinner-plate, but it pushed the boat along at a good gait, the boat shaking and trembling at every explosion in the cylinder. The skipper, seated on an empty box by the engine, laughed.
“How do you like her?” he asked. “Some cruiser, eh? I knocked her together two, three years ago. Got that engine out of a yacht dinghy that sank over by Eagle Beak one time. She’s sort of wet underfoot, but she generally gets there. You fellers from Hillman’s?”
Bob said they were.
“Fine man, the Doctor. Used to work for him sometimes when I was in high school. Mowed grass and so on a couple of summers. My name’s Ambrose Wilkins. Called Brose generally. What sort of a baseball team you fellers going to have up there this year?” He gave a negligent tug at the tiller-line and swerved around the stern of a tug that was backing out from the coal-wharf with a lighter snuggled beside her.
“Why, pretty good, I reckon,” answered Laurie.
Brose Wilkins’s grin broadened more. “Guess you weren’t up there when we played you that twenty-two to three game. Course not. That was five years ago. That was some game, boys. Hillman’s didn’t get a hit until the fifth and didn’t put a run over until the eighth. Then our in-field went flooey for a minute, and your crowd piled in three runs. Some game!”
“Did you play?” asked Laurie.
Brose nodded and squirted some oil in the general direction of the little engine. “Yeah,” he answered. “Pitched.”