Page:Outdoor Girls at Rainbow Lake.djvu/122

110 in here. I worked out your reckoning and I calculated that you'd be here about to-day, so I come by train, stayed over night, and here I arn. What kind of a voyage did you have?"

"Very good--one little accident, that's all," and she told about getting adrift.

"Pshaw, now! That's too bad! I'll have to give you some lessons in mooring knots, I guess. It won't do to slip your cable in the middle of the night."

The girls were as glad to see Betty's uncle as he was to greet them, and soon, with plenty of supplies on board, and with the old sea captain at the wheel, which Betty graciously asked him to take, the Gem slipped down the river again.

At noon, when they tied up to go ashore in a pleasant grove for lunch, Mr. Marlin demonstrated how to tie so many different kinds of knots that the girls said they never could remember half of them. But most particularly he insisted on all of them learning how to tie a boat properly so it could not slip away.

Betty already knew this, and Mollie had a fairly good notion of it, but Grace admitted that, all along, she had been making a certain wrong turn which would cause the knot to slip under a strain.