“I’ve been trying to figure out what happened here,” said Allan. “There was some man in this cabin, and he was getting supper when we gave that first shout. Now, it might be he looked out, and glimpsing a bunch of fellows in khaki suits and carrying guns, running this way, he thought we were soldiers. He may have had some good reason for not wanting to meet up with the State troops, and so cut and ran for it. That’s the thing I’ve made my mind up to.”
“And according to my way of thinking you’re close to the truth, Allan,” he was told by the patrol leader.
“I noticed that you dropped that bar in place, Thad, after you’d shut the door; what was the idea of doing that?”
“Well, it doesn’t seem to be just the right thing, fastening a man’s own door against him,” laughed the other; “but as we all want to get some sleep to-night, being tired, I thought it might be best to fix things so we’d have ample warning if the owner of the boat did turn up. Let him knock, and we’ll be only too glad to open up; only we don’t want him to walk in on us and catch us napping. There’s no telling how unpleasant he might make it for us.”
This sound reasoning appealed favorably to Allan.
“The window you see has got a stout iron bar across it,” he went on to say; “and a fellow would have the time of his life trying to crawl through such a small space; so it’s all right; we can lie down to sleep without worrying.”
They were in fact pretty well played out, having been up a good part of the previous night, it will be remembered, and the day’s tramp had been anything but a picnic to certain members of the party who need not be mentioned by name.
Accordingly, about an hour after they had finished supper there began to be a movement on foot looking to finding accommodations for spreading blankets on the hard floor of the cabin.
Space was somewhat at a premium, since there were eight of the scouts. The owner of the shanty boat had some sort of contraption in the way of a cot which in the daytime could be fastened up against the wall, and in this manner avoid taking up a considerable amount of space, to be dropped when needed. None of the boys considered for a moment using that cot, all of them preferring to make sure of the protection of their own clean blankets on the floor.
Bumpus, while very tired, was afraid that he might not get to sleep as easily as he would have liked, because of the way his mind was worked up. Giraffe, in talking about matters, had happened to suggest that possibly the man owning the boat may have been seized with a fit when he was stooping over to draw some water from the river in a bucket, and had fallen overboard; and the thought of such a terrible thing happening filled the mind of tender-hearted Bumpus, who never liked to see anyone suffer if he could help it.