Houseboat Girl Read Online Free Page B

safe place to hide.” Mama patted the little girl on the back. “I don’t like the locks, either,” she said.
    After the lock excitement there was nothing much to see. The banks on both sides were low and far away. There were no towns on the Kentucky side from Paducah all the way to the Mississippi River.
    The day wore slowly on. A Diesel towboat, hauling coal from West Virginia, caught up with the houseboat and went on ahead. Mama cooked dinner and then Bunny and Dan took naps. Patsy got tired of the kitten, found Dan’s harmonica and played for a while. Mama took up a batch of mending. Milly came in, complaining of a headache.
    Patsy decided to go fishing. She climbed up on the houseboat roof and brought down a pole and line. She baited her hook with a piece of fat. Then she sat down on the porch floor and threw out her line. But nothing happened. No fish came to bite. All at once her fish pole fell out of her hand into the water. It floated beside the hull. Patsy held onto the porch post with her hand, leaned out and stretched her leg out over the water toward the pole.
    “Oh Patsy! Don’t!” called Mama. “Don’t do that!”
    But the girl had already caught the fish pole between her bare toes and was hauling it up on deck.

    “What’s the matter?” she asked her mother.
    “Oh, you make me so nervous,” said Mama. “Looks as if you’re just determined to fall in!”
    “Are there no fish at all in this old river?” asked Patsy.
    “Too many dams on the Ohio and too little current,” said Mama. “Wait till we get to the Mississippi. It’s plumb full of catfish and scale fish, too.”
    “When will we get there?” asked Patsy. To her surprise, she found a large jumping fish on her line.
    “Tomorrow maybe,” said Mama.
    “Where are we going to stay tonight?” asked Patsy.
    “At Mound City,” said Mama. “We’ll go visit Uncle Fred this evenin’. Can’t pass by with Uncle Fred lookin’ for us.”
    The sun was already setting when the Fosters reached Mound City, Illinois, a real river town with an active boatways on the water front. Daddy tied up in a small cove to one side. He came in the kitchen to wash the oil and grease off his hands and face, and to change his clothes.
    The minute the boat stopped, the children rushed to the bank. It seemed good to be on land again. “You’d think they’d just crossed the ocean,” said Mama.
    Patsy put a plank from the cabin boat to the bank. She shooed her chickens out of their coops and up on land. But it was getting dark and they did not want to go. So she sprinkled corn on the plank to coax them back in again. They seemed to know that the coop was their home. They did not like the strange river bank.
    Then Uncle Fred was there with his loud booming voice. He took all the Fosters in his car to his house up in town. They ate supper at Uncle Fred’s, played games for an hour with the cousins, and then Uncle Fred brought them back again.
    Already the houseboat had begun to seem like home. Soon they were all asleep in their beds, Tom, the cat, curled up at Patsy’s feet. The river water lapped lazily around the hull and the moon rose over the wide expanse of the Ohio River. All was peace and quiet in the Foster houseboat.
    The next morning Patsy was up early. She put on a T-shirt and blue jeans and went out to the cabin boat. She talked to Daddy while he tinkered with the motor.
    “It won’t take long to get to Cairo,” said Daddy. “Then we’ll be on the Mississippi.”
    “That’s a mean old river, I guess,” said Patsy.
    “Everybody says so,” answered Daddy with a laugh, “but it’s not so bad when you know it. There are plenty of things to cause trouble—wind, pile dikes, tricky currents, snags and sand bars. And there’s nothing worse than meeting a tow in a tight bend. The trouble with that old river is, it wiggles too much!”
    Patsy laughed. She felt safe with Daddy.
    Daddy could not read a book, because he had never been to