"I hate lying," grumbled Coulson loudly; "but I suppose we shall have to?"
"Betcher!" yawned the other, and said his prayers with lightning rapidity.
Daylight brought dismay to the two voyagers.
The hole in the hull was not alone responsible for the flooded hold. There was a great gash in her keel—the plate had been ripped away by some snag or snags unknown. Coulson looked at Jim, and Jim returned the despairing gaze.
"A canoe for mine," said Jim after a while. "Me for the German river and so home. That is the way I intended moving, and that is the way I go."
Coulson shook his head.
"Flight!" he said briefly. "You can explain being in Sanders's territory, but you can't explain the bolt—stick it out!"
All that morning the two men laboured in the hot sun to repair the damage. Fortunately the cement was enough to stop up the bottom leak, and there was enough over to make a paste with twigs and sun-dried sand to stop the other. But there was no blinking the fact that the protection afforded was of the frailest. The veriest twig embedded in a sandbank would be sufficient to pierce the flimsy "plating." This much the two men saw when the repairs were completed at the end of the day. The hole in the bow could only be effectively dealt with by the removal of one plate and the substitution of another, "and that," said Jim, "can hardly happen."
The German river was eighty miles upstream and a flooded stream that ran five knots an hour at that. Allow a normal speed of nine knots to the tiny Grasshopper, and you have a twenty hours' run at best.
"The river's full of floatin' timber," said Jim wrathfully, eyeing the swift sweep of the black waters, "an' we stand no better chance of gettin' anywhere except to the bottom; it's a new plate or nothing."