We rowed a little farther and then pushed in to the bank to rest a bit.
“We want to land a little this side of Willis’s,” Mark decided, “and s-s-sneak up same as we did the other day along the fence.”
“’Tain’t likely they’d hurt us.”
“I dunno. Never can tell when men are doin’ things like this. But I wasn’t figgerin’ on gittin’ hurt, only on bein’ seen. If they found somebody was s-s-spyin’ on ’em they’d up and s-s-scoot. Specially if Batten was to see me. I ain’t easy to forgit.” Mark grinned when he said that. He was right, though; Batten might not remember me if he did see me prowling around, and he might think I was just a kid playing some game or hunting or something; but if he caught sight of Mark, why, he’d know who it was in a minute and why he was there.
When we were rested up we got into my boat again and up the river we went. We rowed and rowed and rowed. “Thank goodness,” I said, “it won’t be such hard pullin’ comin’ back. We kin float down with the current.”
In about another hour we came to the island in the bend of the river, a quarter of a mile below Willis’s. Here the river ran through a big marsh that stretched, all green with tall water-grasses and cat-tails, on either side, and there wasn’t a good place to land. We didn’t want to have to wallow through the marsh, because we knew we’d get in mire up to our knees and maybe higher, and because it looked just like the kind of a place where rattlesnakes would be fussing around. In general, I’m not afraid of rattlesnakes, but I don’t like to go plunging through a place like that and maybe stepping right on one before he has a chance to rattle at you.
Back among the reeds and grasses we could see lots of muskrat houses, and we stowed that fact away to remember, because you can make pretty good money trapping rats and selling their skins; and I thought it would be a fine place for wild duck in the early spring.
We turned back a little to where the shore was more solid and found a place where a rail fence ran right down to the water. We made for that and tied the boat. It wasn’t much of a trick to clamber along the rails to shore, though Mark made them bend so I thought it wouldn’t be very surprising if they broke. That fence wasn’t built to hold fat boys, but to keep in cows.
There was a bank maybe ten feet high to climb before we got to the road. We looked up and down pretty careful before we got up in sight; but nobody was coming, so we ducked cross to the north side where there were a lot of hazel bushes growing along the roadside, and some blackberry bushes, as we discovered by the prickers when we pushed our way through them.
We were pretty cautious, keeping back in the bushes and ready to lie down out of sight if anybody came along, but nobody did, and so we got to the old orchard that was next to Willis’s house. It was a pretty big orchard, but it hadn’t been looked after very well, and the grass was high. The limbs of the trees came close to the ground, and, take it altogether, it made a pretty good place to sneak through if you didn’t want anybody to see you coming.