"I suppose we must tie him up," Tom reluctantly assented. "I hate to treat him that way, for he's a good dog. But if we leave him tied and push off in the boat, he'll howl after a while and his master will find him. Take a bit of fishing-line and tie him."
Morris turned towards the hidden boat, but the hound, as if aware of what they had said, suddenly started for his hidden home and vanished into the underbrush before Tom could catch hold of him. When Tom called, he stopped once and looked back, but he did not come back. He shouldered his way into the bushes and trotted off, with that amusing air of being in a hurry to keep a most important appointment which all dogs sometimes show. And as he started, Morris appeared again, with a shrill whisper: "De boat's dun sunk hisself."
Tom ran to the bank of the creek. The news was too true. The boat had sunk. The rotten caulking had dropped from one of the rotten seams. The bow, tied to a tree in the canebrake, was high in air. The stern was under five feet of water. The oars had floated away. The fishing-pole was afloat, held to the old craft by the hook-and-line, which had caught in the sunken seat. What were they to do? They felt as a Western trapper used to feel, when he had lost his horse and saw himself compelled to make his perilous way on foot through a country swarming with savage foes. What to do?
"We must raise the boat, Morris, get her on shore, turn her over, caulk her with something, make some paddles somehow and get off."
They did, by great effort and with much more noise than they liked to make, drag the crazy old craft upon the bank of the creek. They turned her bottom-side up. The negro plucked down a long, waving mass of Spanish moss from a cypress that grew in the swampy soil. Children in the South call this Spanish moss "old men's gray beards." Each long drift of it looks as if it might have grown on the chin of an aged giant. They were pressing it into the gaping seam with feverish haste, listening the while for any sign of that dreaded coming of the big hound's "folkses." The short twilight of Southern skies ended. A deep curtain of darkness fell upon them. And through it they heard the nearby patter of the dog's paws and the shuffling footfalls of a man. And they saw the gleam of a lantern.
"We'se diskivered, Massa Tom," old Morris whispered, "we'se diskivered."
As he spoke, he slipped over the bank into the creek and lay in much his attitude when Tom had first "diskivered" him, except that the water covered all of him except mouth and nose and eyes. Tom bent down to him.
"Hush," he said, "keep still. There's only one man coming. The dog's all right. I'll meet the man. You stay here."
Then he stepped into a circle of light cast by the lantern upon a mass of underbrush and said, with a cheerful confidence he did not feel: