true, but we're not going to make an ordinary canoe.
We're going to cut out something as nearly like a yawl, or a ship's
launch as possible. She is to be sixteen feet long, and three and a
quarter feet wide amidships."

Sam had learned a good deal about boats during his boyhood in
Baltimore.

"Whew! what do you want such a whopper for?"

"Well, in the first place such a boat will be of use to us down at
Pensacola, where we couldn't use an ordinary canoe at all. You see I'm
going to shape her like a sea boat, partly by cutting away, and partly
by pinning a keel to her."

"What'll you pin it on with?" asked Tom.

"With pins, of course; wooden ones."

"What'll you bore the holes with?"

"With my bit of iron, heated red hot."

"That's so. So you can."

"But, Sam," said Sid.

"Well?"

"You said that was in the first place; what's the next?"

"In the next place, we'll need such a boat in running down the
river."

"Why?"

"Because there'll be no fit camping places in the low grounds, even if
the water isn't over the banks, and so we must stay in the boat night
and day, which would be rather an uncomfortable thing to do in a
little round bottomed dug-out, that would turn over if a fellow
nodded. Beside that I'm anxious to make all the time I can and when we
leave here I mean to push ahead night and day without stopping."

"How'll we manage without eatin' or sleepin'?" asked Jake Elliott, who
seemed somehow to be interested chiefly in discovering what appeared
to him to be insurmountable obstacles in the way of the execution of
Sam's plans.

"I have no thought," answered Sam, "of trying to do without either
eating or sleeping."

"Where'll we eat," asked Jake, "ef we don't stop nowhere?"

"In the boat, of course."

"Yes, but where'll we cook?"

"Here," answered Sam.

"Before we start?"

"Yes, certainly. We'll kill some game, cook it at night and eat it
cold on the way with cold bread. That will save our bacon to cook fish
with down at Pensacola."

"Well, but how about sleeping?"

"That is one of my reasons for making so large a boat. We can sleep in
her very comfortably, one staying awake to steer and paddle, all of us
taking turns at it."

This plan was eagerly welcomed by the boys, who speedily fell to work
upon the log under Sam's direction. The poplar was very easily worked,
and the boys were all of them skilled in the use of the axes.
Relieving each other at the work, they did not permit