“I g-g-got a scheme,” says Mark.
“What is it?” I asked.
Just then Collins strolled over our way, and Mark shut up tight as a locked door. I looked around for Jiggins, but I couldn’t see him. I supposed he’d just walked off to look around a bit, but that wasn’t it. Maybe if I’d called it to Mark’s attention things would have turned out differently from what they did, but I didn’t think it was important. You never can tell, though. After this I’m not going to overlook anything, no matter how silly I may think it is. Mark says the silliest things on the surface are sometimes the deepest down underneath. This was one of them. Mark said Jiggins was a great man, and—well, I came pretty close to agreeing with him before morning.
CHAPTER XIII
So you can understand just what happened that night I will tell you as carefully as I can just how our camp lay and where everything in and around it was. Then you’ll be able to see how hard it was to plan a way for Mark and me to escape, and what a lot of brains Mark Tidd had to have to figure out ahead of time just about what Jiggins and Collins would do with us. I never could have done it. If I was going to think up a scheme to get away I’d have to wait till we were all fixed the way we were going to be. Maybe then I could have figgered something out; but with Mark it was different. He looked ahead. He was always putting himself into somebody else’s shoes and trying to think just the way they would think. I couldn’t do that. But Mark would just make believe he was the other fellow, and you’d be surprised to see how many times he hit it right.
Well, the camp was on a sandy flat shaped like a triangle. The river ran past the base of it, and high banks climbed almost straight up from the two sides. The whole thing was covered with trees and shrubs and grasses, except back about the middle, where there was a small bare patch of sand, and here we had our tent. The base of the triangle was about two hundred feet long, and each of the sides was a little more than that, I should say.
When we came we hauled up our boats at the up-stream end of the flat and turned them over there. That spot was over a hundred feet from the camp, and you couldn’t see the boats from the tent. The fire was at the end of the tent that pointed up-stream. The supplies and paddles and oars were all left under the boats.
When we turned in Collins slept across one opening of the tent and Jiggins across the other. Their feet touched canvas on one side and their heads touched it on the other. Mark and I slept between. We were so close together, when we all got in, that we touched, and before a fellow could roll over he came pretty close to having to ask the man next him to help. Add to that that Collins and Jiggins both bragged about how lightly they slept and said the least noise or touch would wake them, and you’ll see they had us pretty average safe. We couldn’t wiggle without waking one of them.
Before we went to bed we sat by the fire quite a while and talked. Mark got to talking about lassoes and bragged considerable about how he could throw one of them. Jiggins made fun of him, and Mark said get a rope for him and he’d show what he could do. It was pretty dark then, but Collins fished a piece of line about forty feet long out of the mess of stuff under the boats and told Mark to go ahead.
Mark made a noose in the rope and had me run back and forth in the firelight while he whirled the thing around his head and threw at me. He was pretty good at it, and no mistake. He could catch me every time, and about the way he wanted to. First he’d get me around the neck, and then by one foot, and sometimes by a hand if it happened to be sticking out. He told me afterward he’d been practising it in his back yard ever since a Wild West show came to our country-seat. He’d kept still about it because he wanted to give Plunk and Tallow and me a surprise when he got so he could throw good.