“You wait till the infernal revenue people get that name,” I said, “it’ll knock ’em out.” Because, of course, I knew we’d have to send the name to the infernal revenue people—I mean internal or eternal or whatever you call it—because you have to do that to get your license number. “It’s a good name,” I said, “you don’t see it every day.” “Thank goodness for that,” Doc Carson said, “it’s as long as a spelling lesson or Pee-wee’s tongue.” “It’ll be a pretty expensive name; it’ll take a lot of paint,” Brick Warner said. “We should worry,” I said. So then I made some coffee, because I’m the troop cook, and we thought it was best to eat before we started. That bunch is always hungry. They said it was punk coffee, but that was because they didn’t bring enough to go around. “Don’t laugh at the coffee,” I told them, “you may be old and weak yourselves some day.” I made some flapjacks, too, and then we started. We didn’t have to do much work because the ebb was running good and strong, and we just sat around the deck with our feet dangling over, and pushed her off with our scout staffs whenever she ran against the shores. She didn’t keep head on, but that was no matter as long as she went, and pretty soon (I guess it must have been about seven o’clock) we went waltzing into Bridgeboro River. And then was when we made a crazy mistake. Just for a minute we forgot that the tide would be running down the river instead of up. If we had only remembered that, three or four of us could have gone ashore with a rope and tied her in the channel, which ran along the near shore. Then all we would have had to do would have been to sit around and wait for it to turn, so we could drift up to Bridgeboro with it. But just when we were floating out of the creek, we forgot all about what the tide would do to us, unless we were on the job and sure enough it caught us and sent us whirling around and away over on to the flats. “Good night!” I said when I heard her scrape. “We should have had sense enough to know the tide is stronger here than in the creek,” they all said. “What’s the difference?” Dorry Benton said, “we’re stuck on the flats, that’s all. Now we don’t have to bother to tie her. When the tide changes, we’ll float off and go on upstream all right. We’re just as well off as if we were tied up in the channel.” Well, I guess he was right except for what happened pretty soon. So we settled down to wait for the tide to go down and change. After a while we began to see the flats all around us and there wasn’t any water near us at all—only the water in the channel away over near the west shore. We were high and dry and there wasn’t any way for a fellow to get away from where we were, because he couldn’t swim and he’d only sink in the mud, if he tried to walk it.