“I hope not,” Mark told him; “but they ain’t begun to miss us yet. Wait till they git around the h-h-head of the island. They’ll be comin’ back to l-l-look for us then.”
“They can’t find. Sammy knows. Good place to hide.”
For more than an hour we sat in the boat, with muddy water standing a couple of inches deep in it. Mark didn’t feel much like talking, and Sammy didn’t think of anything to say, and I was scared as all get out. When it was beginning to get dusk we heard the other boat coming slow from up-stream, not down-stream, the way it should have come. It was just moving, and the men were talking. We could hear their voices, but what they said we couldn’t make out because it came to us all in a muddle.
They stopped outside the bayou, and we understood Batten when he said: “Looks like there was some sort of a bay in there. See how the weeds and things turn in. Let’s poke in there; maybe it’s big enough to hide a boat.”
Sammy looked at Mark, and he grinned again and winked. He was trying to make Mark feel safe; but it didn’t work. Mark didn’t feel safe, and I didn’t, either, especially when I saw their boat come poking through the high weeds not thirty feet away.
Batten stood up and looked all around. “They ain’t there,” he said, growling-like. “Where they got to I’d give a dollar to know. Here we rowed all around this confounded island, and not a sight of them. Even if I lost the turbine I’d like to get my hands on that fat kid a minute. He’s too smart, he is.”
Mark was pretty pleased at that; but, all the same, he didn’t hanker to let Batten get hold of him. Compliments are all right, but that kind of a compliment is one you don’t get up and bow and say “Thank you” for.
Batten and Bill sat there and rested and grumbled quite a spell, and then, because it was getting dark, they pulled out for home. “Might’s well give up,” said Bill. “We can’t find ’em to-night.”
“And we’re going to disappear before morning ourselves,” said Batten. “We’ll keep an eye out for them till the last minute, though.”
When they were gone Mark drew a long breath and took time to think about the predicament we were in. It wasn’t pretty to think about. There we were, five miles from home by road and I don’t know how many by river, with a heavy engine and a smashed boat, and the only land near enough to do any good full of rattlers and poison ivy. How were we ever going to get to the mainland; and if we did, what could we do with Tidd’s turbine? Mark never denied that we was up a stump. Anybody would have been.