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[Contents]

CHAPTER II

THE ENEMY

Before I go any deeper into my story I will tell you about our canal, for you will need this information to thoroughly understand what follows. 

We call it the Tutter canal, for the reason that it runs through our small town. Over in Ashton, a neighboring small town, the kids call it the Ashton canal. It is a hundred miles long, I guess. Maybe longer. It was built by the state to connect the great lakes with the Gulf of Mexico through the Illinois River and the Mississippi River. 

It isn’t more than forty feet wide where it passes through Tutter. One bank forms a tow path, which was necessary when the canal was new because in those olden days all of the grain boats were drawn by horses and mules. To-day the few boats that come through Tutter are drawn by smoky tugs. 

In the same way that a single-track railroad has [11]sidings that permit trains traveling in opposite directions to pass each other, our canal has “wide waters,” where the canal boats meet and pass. There is a wide waters below Tutter and another one between our town and Ashton. The biggest wide waters that I have seen is the one between Ashton and Steam Corners. Here the canal is more than a mile wide, a sort of lake, though the water for the most part is shallow, with a mud bottom. The channel is marked with parallel rows of piles painted white. 

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Dad says that before the canal was built the Oak Island wide waters was a swamp and the island that I am going to tell you about in my story was a rocky knoll. Of its many trees the largest one is an oak, which grows on the island’s highest point, and it is this noticeable oak that gained for the island its name. 

Well, to get back to my story, we met at Scoop’s father’s grocery store the following morning, no less enthused over our scheme than we had been the preceding evening, each one supplied with his promised share of the new company’s working capital. As treasurer the money was turned over to me. I felt pretty big to have so much money in my pocket. And I sort of held my chest out 

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