He said, “It would be more like a couple of years, I reckon.” “Good night!” I said, “if it takes us two years to get there and we have to be home inside of a month, I see _our_ finish. I suppose it costs a lot of money to get towed.” He said, “Wall now, whin I bring in a Cunarder and back her into her stall, it stands them in a few pennies.” “You said something,” I told him. “’N I don’t suppose your troop has got as much money as the Cunard Line,” he said. “Gee, we’ve only got about four dollars now,” I told him; “I suppose we couldn’t get towed as much as a mile for that, hey?” “Wall, four dollars don’t go as far as it used ter,” he said; “maybe it would go a half a mile.” Then he didn’t say anything, only puffed and puffed and puffed on his pipe, and kept looking straight ahead of him, and turning the wheel ever so little. After a while he said there wasn’t water enough in our river to drown a gold fish, and he didn’t know why we called it a river at all. He said he couldn’t imagine what the tide was thinking about to waste its time coming up such a river. He said if a bird took a drink in the river while he was upstream, it would leave him on the flats. He was awful funny, but he never smiled. When we got up to the mill at North Bridgeboro, he got the barge and started downstream with the barge alongside. All the while he kept asking me about the scouts, and I told him about Skinny, and how we were going to take him up to Temple Camp with us, so he could get better, maybe. Then for quite a while he didn’t say anything, only puffed away and pretty soon we could see the bridge and I knew we’d have to open it again. But anyway, I could see a lot of fellows there and I knew they were all from our troop and that they were waiting to open the bridge for _General Grant_. Pretty soon Captain Savage took his pipe out of his mouth and began speaking, only he didn’t notice me only kept looking straight ahead. “You know how to port a helm?” he said. I told him no—not on a big boat like that anyway. Then he said, “Wall, there’s lots o’ things you got to learn, youngster. And there’s one thing about tug cap’ns that you got to learn, see?” I told him that was what I wanted to do—learn. “Wall, then, I’ll tell you,” he said—this is just what he said—“I’ll tell you, you are in a mighty ticklish place ’n I don’t just see how you’re going to get out of it.” For a minute I was kind of scared. “I ain’t sayin’ you’re not a brisk lot, you youngsters, because you are, and no denyin’. All I’m sayin’ is you’re in a peck of trouble—that’s all.” Then he didn’t say anything only looked straight ahead out of the window and kept on smoking. Gee, I felt awful funny. Then I said if we did anything that wasn’t right, cracky, we didn’t mean it anyway, that was sure, and we’d do whatever he said. And I said I knew it wasn’t right for us to break into Uncle Jimmy’s shanty, because I couldn’t think of anything else we’d done that was wrong.