Oh, boy! you should have seen that kid.  He fired a wet bailing sponge at me and I dodged it and it hit one of his own patrol—­kerflop!  I guess you’ll think all us fellows are crazy, especially me.  I should worry.  I told them I escaped in the canoe and all that kind of stuff, but at last I told them the real story and you can bet they were glad I was saved.  They all said I had a narrow escape, and I admit it was only about an inch wide.

Now, I have to tell you about how we floated the house-boat down to Bridgeboro River, and maybe you’d better look at the map, hey?  Oh, but first I want to tell you about the name we gave it.  Some name!  We christened it with a bottle of mosquito dope.  It’s regular name was all rubbed off, so we decided we’d vote on a new name.

This is the way we fixed it.  Each patrol thought of a name and then we mixed the three names up and made one name out of them.  Then you just add a little sugar and serve.

The Ravens voted the name Sprite, the Elks voted the name Fly and the Silver Foxes voted the name Weetonka, on account of me.  Then we wrote all these letters down and mixed them all up and arranged them every which way, till we got this name: 

RESOPEKITWAFTENLY

Oh, boy, some laugh we had over that name.  We were all sitting around in the two cabin rooms and believe me, it was some giggling match.

“It sounds like a Bolshevik name,” Westy Martin said.

“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.