G-o-o-d night! Jiminy, I didn’t know what to say to him. I guess I just stood there staring and he looked straight ahead out of the window and smoked his pipe, as if he didn’t care either way.
Pretty soon he said, “I’m going up to Poughkeepsie next Saturday with a barge, and I’ll give you youngsters till Friday to decide. You can send me a line to the barge office or the Pilots’ Association, or else you can leave me and old Uncle Jimmy fight it out between our two selves and Uncle Sam.”
The fellows opened the bridge for _General Grant_ to go through and Captain Savage let me out on one of the cross-beams, without even stopping. He didn’t even look at the fellows as the tug went through, only looked straight ahead of him and puffed away on his pipe, as if he didn’t even know that there were such things as scouts. We just stood there watching the tug churning up the water, as she went faster and faster until she was gone around the bend.
“He’s a kind of an old grouch,” Pee-wee said.
“It’s good you happened to think about how he used that word _desert_,” Doc said.
Then Connie said he wouldn’t want to be his son and Artie said he wouldn’t want to be around the house with him on a rainy Sunday, and I let them go on knocking him, until they got good and tired and then I said,
“I bet he wants us to go and be witnesses against Uncle Jimmy,” Pee-wee said; “he’ll never get me to be a witness, you can bet.”
“Wrong the first time, as usual,” I said; “he wants to tow the house-boat up as far as Poughkeepsie for us next week.”
Well, you should have seen those fellows.
“I told him that I was sorry, but that scouts couldn’t accept anything for a service—not even favors.”
“You’re crazy!” Pee-wee shouted; “did you tell him that?”
“Sure I did,” I said, very sober, “and he got so mad he’s going to have old Uncle Jimmy sent to jail—just because I told him we couldn’t let him tow us to Poughkeepsie.”
“You make me tired!” Pee-wee screamed, “do you mean to say that if a fellow does a good turn to another—an old man—and it turns out to be a good turn on somebody else, and he says—the other one that has a boat—that he’ll make a lot of trouble for the other one we did a service for—do you mean to tell me that the other one has a right to say he’ll make trouble for him, and if he does we haven’t got a right to let him do a good turn to us, so that the other one we did a good turn for can get under a bridge—it’s a good turn to let _him_ do _us_ a good turn, isn’t it? Let’s hear you deny that?”