At last, with a deep-heaved sigh, he rolled away from the spring and with his head resting on the green damp moss, fell asleep.
In the morning Petit woke with the young sun on his face.
He rose, and with his hand shading his eyes, looked up and down. As far as his eye could reach there were no signs of human habitation; no evidences of life. He had landed upon a lonely and unsettled part of the North Coast.
Hunger was still strong in him. He moved his cramped limbs in the direction of the beach.
When he reached his landing place of the previous night he found the boat gone! The tide had carried it out. He could see it drifting on the swell of the deep Pacific, just beyond the edge of the breakers.
It was as well, he told himself, inasmuch as he had intended to stave her in and sink her. The boat was a piece of evidence which he was not anxious to leave behind him.
In a few hours no doubt it would be washed by the incoming tide against the rocks and smashed to pieces.
As a matter of fact, the boat was, by a little series of coincidences, in which the ocean sometimes indulges, carried round into the mouth of the Clarence River to fall at last into the hands of Tom Pagdin. She was first picked up by a fisherman near the Heads. He sold her to a dealer, who had a little trade steamer running up one of the creeks. She had broken adrift one night from the stern of the steamer, and the tide brought her into the Broadstream, where a farmer found her with her nose stuck in the mud next morning.
The farmer, in hope of a reward, in turn, had hidden her in the reeds, and it was there Tom Pagdin found her. He surmised that she was a stray boat, unhitched her, took her further up the stream one evening, and planted her again in the reeds of the opposite bank.