“We didn’t make it water-tight,” said Buck.
“No, and the rain last night was so hard that it just settled above the cover and leaked through. I see now where we have made a mistake. Instead of sinking the ice chest so deep we ought to build it up a bit and have the cover above ground, with sloping sides, so that the water would run away from it. In that way a few drops might leak in, but not a couple of quarts as it did last night.”
Later in the day they made the improvement and did not have any further trouble with wet weather in regard to their provisions. Then they turned their attention to the tents, after having looked around back of them for footprints, but there were none, so they gave it up.
“We might find some way back in the bushes,” said Ted. “But we’ll look ’em up some other time. Let’s see what we can do with the tents.”
They presented quite a problem, for the cut rope had to be tied together. There was no extra rope to be had and while they were tieing pieces together Ted had an idea.
“Look here, I’ve got an idea which will keep us from using pegs or having to tie all these ropes to the smaller pieces.”
“What is it? I don’t see how—”
“The tent ropes on one side of each tent are still tied to the pegs, aren’t they?”
“Sure.”
“Well, the ropes have been cut on the sides of the tents facing each other. Instead of bothering to tie new ropes and peg them down, lets tie the ropes from each tent together and simply lay a heavy log across the ropes. That will be heavy enough to hold down the canvas and when it rains again we won’t have to loosen ropes because as the canvas tightens it will simply raise the weighing logs a little bit.”