“Now see here,” he said, “you don’t have to worry about this yere boy. Any youngster with the spunk to wrestle with a robber, an’ be dropped off a steamboat into cold water at midnight, an’ swim across the Ohio River, an’ run three miles, naked, with mean dogs after him--can look out for himself. He’ll be cookin, fishin’, _an’_ choppin’ wood long ’fore he gits to New Orleans.” With these words Tad was officially admitted to membership in the crew of the home-made flatboat _Katy Roby_ and set forth on one of the strangest and most interesting adventures that ever befell a fifteen-year-old school boy. All that fine April day they made steady progress down the swollen river. Part of the time Abe and Allen worked at the oars, adding a mile or two an hour to the speed of the current. Part of the time they loafed in the sun on the half-deck, asking Tad questions about the politer world of the Eastern cities and swapping yarns about their own great frontier country. “You mean to tell me they _all_ wear shoes in New York?” asked Abe incredulously. “Yes,” said Tad, “all but a few poor children. I’ve never gone barefoot since I was a baby.” “Gosh!” the lanky backwoodsman exclaimed. “Look at _my_ feet!” He pulled off his moccasin and showed a sole covered by a single vast callus. “Outside of about five months in winter when I wore hide boots, I never had a shoe on my foot till last year. Pap always figgered it was cheaper to let me grow my own leather,” he added, with the twinkle in his gray eyes that Tad was learning to expect. Piecing together what the two boatmen told him and what he picked up from their conversation, he learned that Allen Gentry was the son of a merchant living in the settlement at the mouth of Little Pigeon Creek, where Tad had first sought shelter in the flatboat. His father, James Gentry, was the owner of the craft, and was sending Allen to sell the corn, pork, and potatoes which made up its cargo in the great produce market of New Orleans. Abe, as he himself told Tad, was merely a “hired hand,” sent along to do the heavy work and to “take keer” of Allen. But it was quite apparent that the long-limbed country boy with his quaint humor and his common sense was the real leader of the expedition. CHAPTER V When the lingering spring sunset came, the flatboat was bowling along so merrily that Abe decided to make a long day’s run of it. He left the bow sweeps and stretched his long bulk on the little after deck with the steering-oar under his arm. Allen pulled out a home-made banjo from some mysterious hiding-place and proceeded to strum it softly. His pleasant tenor voice, floating out across the reaches of the river, was joined by a bass bellow from another broadhorn astern, and for several miles they drifted to the mellow harmony of “Skip to My Lou,” “Weevily Wheat,” “Down the Big River,” and “Wabash Gals.”