Page:Stringer - Lonely O'Malley.djvu/357



OT a breeze was stirring. The afternoon was hot and humid and opalescent. The last crumb in the Greyhound's provision-chest had long since been made away with. Never before had the current of the languid old river seemed so relentless, so indomitable, so doggedly unflagging.

The crushed and broken Captain had even suggested that he speed home by land, and return secretly with Plato and a clothes-line or two, that the Greyhound might be towed back to her anchorage after the fashion of the more humble and decorous canal-boat. But the mutinous crew would have none of this demeaning method of locomotion. The Greyhound could do what she liked. They were going swimming.

The disconsolate pirates of Watterson's Creek got only as far as the lower town swimming-hole. Here, after a brief but bitter battle, with missiles taken aboard for the