“We got to escape t-t-to-night, sure,” says he.
“Yes,” says I.
“And,” says he, “we got to fix it so we d-d-don’t go far to-day. We got to l-lay up the expedition.”
“How?” I asked.
“Dun’no’,” says he. “We’ll wait for a streak of l-l-luck.”
It was noon by the time we got back to the boats, and, naturally, Jiggins and Mark insisted we should have dinner right then and there. Nobody objected much. That took up about an hour, and then we wasted another hour resting and fussing around. But Collins insisted on our getting started at last. We went the same way as before—Jiggins and Mark in the flatboat, and Collins with me in the canoe.
We paddled along, not saying much, for an hour. My back ached, and I wished I was ashore lying under a tree. So did Collins, by the look of him. Nothing happened except turtles flopping into the water off logs, or birds flying overhead. The only noise was the flow of the water, and we were so used to that by this time we didn’t notice it any more. It was like the tick of a clock. Did you ever sit in the room with a clock and try to see if you could hear it tick? Well, just try it sometime. Mostly folks are so accustomed to the sound that it sort of stops being a sound and gets to be a part of one sound made up of a lot of little ones. I know I’ve had to try hard and put all my attention to it before I could make out the ticking. And that’s the way it was with the river.
The banks of the river kept getting higher and higher until we came to a bend where the river widened out into a sort of pool with a backwater, and up from this rose a bluff higher than anything we’d seen. At the foot of this bluff was a little flat of sand that drifted down and stuck there, and on the edge was a mess of driftwood and logs. The most interesting things, though, were an old boat-house and a tiny shanty that stood on the flat. No, they weren’t the most interesting, though I did think so for a spell. The really interesting thing was a big, fat woodchuck that was feeding not twenty feet from the boat-house up on the side of the hill.
I yelled at him. He turned and looked for all the world like he was scowling at us. Then he ducked into the boat-house and disappeared.
“B-bet his hole’s in there,” Mark Tidd yelled. “Let’s go ashore and see.”