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We lived in my father's house for a couple of years and then moved across the channel. The island had a four slip boathouse, one for each home on the island. Next to the boathouse was a pile of wood and an old wood table about four feet square. Also there were the burn slabs of concrete with wire basket burners, for all the paper and burnable refuse. It was one of my duties to burn the flammable trash. I always liked burning stuff and watching the flame consume, even in below-zero snow. There were two six-by-six pieces of lumber, each about twelve feet long. I turned the table upside down with the legs sticking up and nailed the table to the six-by-sixes making a crude raft. Nailed on a few more boards for flooring and got someone to help lift it up onto the sea-wall and push it over into the channel.

It was some days after the battle in late afternoon, my brother, I and someone else, poled and paddled the raft down the channel to the Pat Roger Gang's fort. We wrecked it, even if it was already abandoned. It was a bit of a wet ride with the deck riding about an inch above the water-line and it was heavy as anything. Think it was the first and last time we ever used it.

I was a pagan in those days. I didn't know I was a pagan, but I was the only Indian in town, and all the rest of the boys were cowboys, which I thought were stupid, violent, uncouth and oblivious. Now Indians were a different story.

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