True enough, the shanty boat began to move, rocked violently for a brief period, and then seemed to be floating once more along the rolling current on an even keel, greatly to the relief of Bumpus, who was holding his breath with the dreadful suspense.
“How long do you suppose now we can keep sailing like this?” Step Hen asked.
“If nothing happens to us until morning comes,” replied Thad, “we’ll find some way to get ashore, when we can see how to work.”
“Sure thing!” added Davy. “But I hope now we don’t strike any old cataract or falls, where we’d be swept over a dam, and get wrecked. Seems to me I’ve heard of such things along the Susquehanna.”
His words must have brought a new spasm of alarm to the heart of Bumpus, for he clutched Thad’s sleeve, as though imploring him to set that fear at rest.
“If there are,” the patrol leader told them, “it must be a good deal further upstream than where we are. While the Susquehanna isn’t called a navigable river, except down near its mouth, where it empties into the bay, it’s an open stream for a long distance. Don’t bother thinking about mill-dams and that sort of thing. The worst terror we’ve got to face is the everlasting snags all around us. If one punched a hole in the lower part of the boat we’d be apt to sink.”
“Wish we had life preservers, then,” remarked Bumpus; “I thought every boat was compelled to keep such things aboard.”
“They are, if they carry a certain number of passengers,” Thad told him.
“Yes,” added Giraffe, as he reached up and took some small object from a shelf, where it had remained all this while, in spite of the movements of the boat, “and this craft was well provided, too, for you can see that this is an empty bottle, the mate to the one the tramps threw away. They all seem to patronize the same brand around this section, too, because it’s as like that other flask as two peas in a pod.”
Thad looked at the emptied bottle, but made no remark. Had Giraffe been observing the patrol leader closely, however, instead of keeping his eyes fixed on what he was exhibiting, he might have wondered what the little flash of intelligence passing over Thad’s face could mean, and whether the other had conceived a sudden thought of some kind.