Boy Scouts in Mexico | Page 4

tell us about it! What's
the matter with the Tennessee river, or the Rio Grande?"
"If you had no money, how did you get your houseboat?" asked another
member of the group. "Houseboats don't grow on bushes down there,
do they?"
"Oh, we had a little money," George Fremont replied, "but not enough
to take us to Chicago in Pullman coaches. The joint purse was

somewhere about $10. We built the houseboat ourselves, of course."
"Must have been a strange experience, going broke like that!" one of
the others said. "Hurry up and tell us about it! I believe it does a fellow
good, once in a while, to get where he's got to hustle for himself or go
hungry!" he added, glancing at the others for appreciation of the
sentiment.
"I suppose it does seem funny for some other fellow to be broke in a
desolate land," said another voice, "but it isn't so funny right there on
the spot. Little Old New York looked a long way off when we were in
Nashville!"
The speaker, a boy of sixteen, short, and heavily built, left a window
from which he had been looking out on a wild March night and joined
the group before the fire. This was Frank Shaw, familiarly known to his
friends of the Black Bear Patrol, Boy Scouts of America, as "Fatty"
Shaw. He was the only son of a wealthy newspaper owner of the big
city, and in training to succeed his father in the editorial chair.
"So, 'Fatty' was there!" exclaimed one of the group. "How did you ever
get him into a houseboat? Must have been a big one!"
"Yes, Frank was there," Fremont replied, with a friendly glance at
young Shaw. "His father sent him along to report the expedition."
"I haven't seen any book about it!" broke in another.
"Frank wrote four postal cards and nine letters," laughed Fremont. "The
cards were descriptive of the scenery, and the letters asked for more
money."
"Why can't we get up a trip down the Rio Grande this spring?" was
asked. "The soldiers are on the border, and it would be sporty. We can
stand guard with Uncle Sam."
"I want to know how Fremont got his houseboat," said one of the lads.
"Perhaps we can get one in the same way. It would be fun to build a

boat. Anyhow, I'm for the Rio Grande trip this spring. It would be
glorious."
"We might build the boat up in New Mexico," said the other, "and drop
down to the Gulf. That is, I guess we could. The Rio Grande is shallow,
and large boats run only a short distance up the river, but we might
make it with a small one."
"Let Fremont tell how he built his boat and got his provisions."
"Well," Fremont began, "we were standing on the high bridge at
Nashville, one day, when Frank Shaw brought out the brilliant thought.
He was doing a thinking part just then, for there was a fine chance of
our getting good and hungry before our checks got to us."
"Then he was thinking, all right!" a boy laughed.
"Frank explained," George continued, "that the Cumberland river had
been placed in the scenery for the sole purpose of providing
transportation for us to the Mississippi. Then he went on and told how
we could build a flat-boat with a cabin on it and beat the railroads out
of our fare to Cairo. So we counted our money, right there, on the
bridge, and started for a lumber yard."
"It was a sporty notion, all right! Just you wait until we get a houseboat
into the dirty waters of the Rio Grande!"
"When we got the lumber, we all turned to and built the boat. We didn't
know much about boat-building, but we used what few brains we had
and got the boards together in pretty good shape, considering. Boy
Scouts can do almost anything now, since they're learning how to help
themselves. There isn't a boy in the room who can't build a fire with
sticks and cook a good meal on it. Also, we'll show, directly, that we
can build a houseboat on the Rio Grande."
"If we are as slow at building the boat as we are in getting this story out
of you, we won't get started toward the Gulf of Mexico until cold
weather next fall."

"We bought two pine planks sixteen feet long," Fremont went on, with
a smile at the impatience of the boys, "a foot wide, and two inches thick.
We sloped the end so the boat would be scow-shaped, and bought
matched flooring for the bottom. We put tar into all the seams, joints
and grooves to keep the water out. Then we bought half-inch boards