“Now see what you did,” I says to Mark, as I groped for the paint. It was his fault, all right; he should have known better; but I expect he got so interested in his experiment he forgot I might make a racket.
“C-can’t be helped now,” says he. “Come careful.”
We ran as fast as we could. Mark knew where the ropes were, and so we got over them safely, and in a couple of jerks of a lamb’s tail we were at the canoe. Mark had it in the water all ready, and we stepped in.
“Shove off,” says Mark.
Just as we left the shore we heard a crash and a lot of yelling back at the beginning of the path. Somebody had hit Mark’s first man-trap.
“L-lucky I thought of that,” says he.
“If you hadn’t thought of it we never would have been discovered,” says I. I was scratched and bumped and felt pretty cross.
“Paddle,” says he.
The stream was narrow there, but deep enough to float a canoe. The current was swift, but it was so dark we couldn’t see much where we were going. About all we had to go by was that the shore looked blacker than where there wasn’t any shore. One good thing was that there weren’t any stones or dead-heads or brush-heaps.
We had to take chances or we would have gone along slow and careful, but luck was with us, I expect, and we didn’t have any serious accident. A couple of times we scraped the shore, and once we grounded going around a curve, but on the whole we felt pretty well satisfied. We had got away.