“What, then?”
“I dun’no’ yet. Lemme think.”
He leaned up against a big tree and began tugging at his puffy cheek. He always does that when he’s studying. If he runs onto something harder than usual he whittles. You can make up your mind, when you see him whittling, that pretty soon you’ll hear an idea that’s an idea. This time he didn’t seem to think it was necessary to whittle.
I thought of a bed Mark made once before by cutting four forked stakes and laying poles across them, and then cross-pieces, but here the ground was so soggy and oozy we would have had to drive telegraph-poles to get deep enough to hold. If we made stake-beds they’d be sunk down so we laid in the mud in half an hour.
All the time we were smacking mosquitoes. As soon as we came ashore it looked as if they came swarming down to chase us away. If there had been any way for us to go they would have done it, too. We didn’t want to stay. I can’t think of any place we wouldn’t rather have been.
“I g-g-got it,” says Mark at last. “Come on b-b-back where the trees are thicker.”
We wallowed back into the woods, feet wet, sweat running off from us in streams, and mosquito-bites from head to foot. I never imagined anybody could be so uncomfortable.
Mark had the ax. After a while he stopped and began measuring between trees. I looked to see if I could study out his scheme, but I couldn’t. There were four trees standing in a sort of square about ten feet apart. I could see how we could use them for the posts of a bed if they were cut down, but we didn’t have any nails to fasten poles to them, or any other way of doing it that I could see.
Mark measured carefully between two of the trees and then went to cut down a small tree about six inches thick. I helped at that. We carried it back to the four big trees and put it down. Then Mark picked up the ax and began chopping into one of the big trees about three feet from the ground.
“It’ll take all night to chop that tree down,” I says.