But we knew Gadabout and how we had taken the craft almost everywhere that people had told us she could not go.  For, to our minds, one of the chief charms of houseboating lay in poking about in such out-of-the-way places.

Let the yacht reign supreme as the deep-water pleasure craft, that trails its elegance perforce ever up and down the same prescribed channels.  The ideal houseboat is the light-draft water gypsy, that turns often from the buoyed course and wanders off into the picturesque world of little waters; along streamlets that lead in winding ways to quaint bits of nowhere, and into quiet shallows of forgotten lagoons that have fallen asleep to the lullaby of their own rushes.

So it was settled that our houseboat was to try to go up the creek to Weyanoke’s back door, and again we were waiting only for the turn of the tide.  When sticks and straws and frost-tinted leaves, floating down past us toward the James, changed their minds and started back up the Kittewan, Gadabout went with them.

After a while the creek began to shallow rapidly and we kept the sailor on ahead in a shore-boat sounding, while we tried to keep the houseboat from running over him.  The southerly breeze was gradually freshening and Gadabout began to show a corresponding partiality for the northern bank of the stream.  But, on the whole, she was behaving very well and apparently the mutinous spirit of the day before had entirely disappeared.  We had to stop just before coming to an island standing in a sharp turn of the little waterway.

“Looks like we can’t make this bend, sir,” called the sailor from the shore-boat.  “There’s a sure enough bar ’cross here.”

By keeping at it, he managed to find a channel for going round on the port side of the island.  Then he came aboard, started an engine, and we moved on again.  But Gadabout had been deceiving us; she still had no notion of going up the creek.  We were just starting to go around the island when she suddenly transferred her allegiance from the steering-wheel to the wind, and sidled off in the marshes till she brought up hard aground.  There was nothing to do but to wait for the rising tide.

Nautica got out the chart again to see where we were.  At Weyanoke there are two plantations, an upper one and a lower one; and for a while she was busy measuring between the stream and the little black dots that indicated the plantation buildings.  At last, after a final counting up on her fingers, she announced, “If we can get around six more bends of this curly stream, we shall be within less than half a mile of the house at Lower Weyanoke.”

As the water rose around the houseboat, we threw out a kedge anchor, hauled off, and got under way again.  Now, Gadabout started at once to go around the island—­but (mutiny again!) she was going around on the wrong side.  The Commodore and the sailor, with long poles, pushed frantically in the mud striving to set the unruly craft in the way she should go; but she was determined to take the wrong channel and was slowly getting the better of us.