"No; but you got a little water into your lungs," responded one of the girls. "I heard Mr. Driggs tell Dick Prescott that, as nearly as they could guess, you opened your mouth a trifle just before Dick and Dave reached you and freed you from that awful trap. Mr. Driggs said that if you had been under water two minutes longer there would have been a different story to tell." "I wonder how long I was under water?" mused Dan. "Long enough to drown, Danny Grin," replied Clara Marshall gravely. Meanwhile the scow was making slow headway out into the river and slightly up stream. "Dick, don't you think this canoeing is going to prove too dangerous a sport for you boys?" asked Laura, regarding him with anxious eyes. "Not when we get so that we know how to behave ourselves in a canoe, Laura," young Prescott answered. "Yet, no matter how skilful you become, some unexpected accident may happen at any moment," she urged. "You wouldn't have us be mollycoddles, would you?" asked Dick in surprise. "Certainly not," replied Laura with emphasis. "Yet you would advise us to avoid everything that may have some touch of danger in it." "I wouldn't advise that, either," Laura contended with sweet seriousness. "But-----" "You'd like to see us play football some day, wouldn't you?" "I certainly hope you'll make the high school eleven." "Football is undoubtedly more dangerous than canoeing," Dick claimed. "It seems too bad that boys' best sports should be so dangerous, doesn't it?" questioned young Miss Bentley. "I can't agree with you," Dick answered quietly. "It takes danger, and the ability to meet it, to form a boy's character into a man's." "Then you believe in being foolhardy, as a matter of training?" asked Laura, with a swift flash of her eyes. "By no means," Prescott rejoined. "Foolhardy means just what the word implies, and only a fool will be foolhardy. If we had been trying to upset the canoe, as a matter of sport, that would have been the work of young fools." It was not difficult to locate the spot where the canoe had gone down. The river's current was not swift, and the paddles now floated not very far below the spot where the cherished craft of Dick & Co. had gone down. "Do you want the services of some expert divers, Mr. Driggs?" asked Dave, turning from a brief chat with Belle Meade. "Not you boys," retorted the boat builder. "You youngsters have been fooling enough with the river bottom for one day." "Then how do you expect to get hold of the canoe, sir?" asked Tom Reade. "We'll grapple with tackle," replied Driggs, going toward an equipment box that stood on the forward end of the scow. "We'll use the same kind of tackle that we've sometimes dragged the bottom with when looking for drowned people." Laura Bentley slivered slightly at his words. Driggs' keen eyes noted the fact, and thereafter he was careful not to mention drowned people in her hearing.