There’s only one good thing I can say about that night—we weren’t cold. Everything else in the world was the matter with it. If there hadn’t been anything but just the idea of sleeping off there alone in the heart of the woods it would have been very comfortable. How did we know what sort of animal might come along? And there might be snakes! It’s easy for Tallow and Plunk to say they wouldn’t been nervous, but they were back in uncle’s house, where they could lock the door and get in bed. You don’t want to say you would be so mighty brave in a place until you’ve been in it.
We did sleep some. Most likely we slept more than we thought we did. At any rate, it wasn’t enough. I was waked up just about the crack of day, and I was mean enough to wake Mark up for company. We laid and talked a spell, and then got up to finish fixing the canoe and have our breakfast.
It didn’t take so very long to patch up the canoe so it would float and didn’t leak. Breakfast was pretty thin, too. We didn’t feel like cooking, somehow.
The next thing on the program was to haul the canoe around the fallen tree and get into it. This wasn’t so easy as it sounds, especially the getting-into-it part. We tugged and pulled her over to the water, but the bank dropped off sharp, and the current just more than rushed by. Mark tied a rope to the canoe and got in. She was half in the water then. I pushed her along till she was all afloat, but I didn’t dare let go my hold on the rope to jump in myself. I stood three or four feet from the shore, pulling for dear life to keep the canoe from getting away from me.
“P-p-put the rope around that tree,” says Mark, pointing. “Then th-throw the end to me. I can hold her that way, and let her g-go when I want to.”
I did what he said and got the end of the rope to him, all right. It was as simple as could be. I could have thought of it myself, only somehow I didn’t happen to. Mark was one of the kind of fellows that usually happen to think of what they need to think of.
I scrambled aboard, and Mark let go the rope. We spun around twice before we could get control of the canoe again, but no harm came of it.
The stream carried us along at a ripping speed. We began to breathe in the good air, and after a while the tiredness was breathed out of us and we began to enjoy ourselves. It was pretty in those woods. All along the edge of the stream were flowers, and birds were flying overhead, and turtles and frogs were splashing in as we went by. Somehow it didn’t seem as if a human being ever saw it all before. There wasn’t a thing to make you think a man ever was near. It was just woods, woods, woods, and stream, stream, stream. I’ll bet it didn’t look a bit different when Columbus discovered America.
As I say, we were enjoying ourselves and forgetting all about how bad a night we passed. We were looking forward to meeting Uncle Hieronymous pretty soon and warning him so he wouldn’t lose his mine, and then, we said, we could drive back to the house and take things easy the rest of the summer.
We planned all sorts of things we would do. Mark just got through plannin’ how we would go over to the lake and explore all around it when we spun around the last bend of the cut-off and shot out into the main river. That was sort of a relief, but it wasn’t any relief when somebody not a hundred feet up-stream from us yelled, “There they are!”