Poor little villain! He must have been in an exceedingly cramped and uneasy position; but his pride and his orthodoxy came to his relief, and he would not complain to the pitiless arbitrators of his fate.
“Look here, boys,” George cried, “if you are bound to punish him, you ought to kick out the end of that box, so that he could sit up straight, like a man, and be comfortable.”
“Yes, it is too bad,” Steve said pityingly. “But it will soon be over; and if we should go to tampering with the box, we might kick Bob in the stomach. Besides, Bob looks more forlorn than he is; and we have no business to destroy his boxes and things.—Now, where’s the rope, and then we will hurry through with it and let Bob out.”
About three hundred feet of the cord were disentangled, and once more the raft was set afloat with a prisoner on it.
In order to humble Bob still further, Steve intended to let Carlo carry the end of the rope in his mouth for a little way. But now he had not the heart to do it. As the raft floated along lazily, Steve essayed to give a shout of triumph, but it died away in his throat.
The dog, however, began to gambol, sneeze, and bark, in an extraordinary manner. During the trial he had been the only really neutral one, and now he seemed to enjoy himself more than any of the self-styled judges. Bob looked on in some uneasiness, but he need not have been alarmed, for the dog made no motion to swim out and attack him.
The boys did not exactly understand it, yet somehow they seemed to take no pleasure in floating Herriman down the stream; and instead of an exultant procession along the bank, they marched solemnly onward, hardly speaking, and each one becoming more and more ashamed of himself. George had a theory of his own about this, but he did not make it known.
Seeing that matters had gone so far, Steve and Charles did not wish to stop till Bob had had his ride; but they felt ill at ease, and their conscience almost persuaded them that they were in the wrong.
So with the entire five (Jim being, as the reader has doubtless divined, a mere supernumerary in this history, although he figures conspicuously once or twice.) From the moment they placed the boy in his cage they began to relent.
To any person coming upon them, this risible spectacle would have been presented: six boys marching gravely down the stream; some three hundred feet in advance a raft drifting lazily along; on said raft a box, from which protruded an enormous head,—large enough for a genius,—neatly covered with a now battered but once respectable—nay, fashionable—straw hat.