“Yup!”
“Well, I pass!” said Frank.
“I’ll be hanged if I want to be a mule all the way to Buffalo,” said Arthur in a manner suggestive of antagonism. “I wouldn’t mind it for forty or fifty miles; but four hundred! Well, I guess not.”
There was gloom in the little cabin that night, in spite of the brightly burning lamp.
With the morning, came a friend who was a friend indeed. An old canal man had read the story of the cruise in an Albany paper, and admiring the pluck of the boys had proceeded to look them up.
“I’ll tell you what to do,” said he, when he learned of their predicament. “You buy a horse at this end and sell him at the other.”
“Buy a horse; what do you take us for, millionaires?” Arthur voiced the sentiments of the crowd.
“Naw,” responded the newly-found friend, with a twinkle in his eye, as he surveyed the far from fashionable clothes they wore; “you don’t have to be a Vanderbilt; you can buy a horse for twenty dollars, perhaps less.”
It ended by Ransom going off with the man to search for a good, cheap nag. At the end of an hour or so the skipper returned, leading a horse by a rather dilapidated bridle. The beast walked without a limp, and seemed healthy; but by her looks one would think that she had more that the stipulated number of ribs—they were so very much in evidence.
“Good gracious, look at the boneyard Ken is leading!” Frank laughed derisively.