They had arrived at the spot where they had left the Black Swan, but the craft had disappeared.
“Certain this is the place?” asked Tom. “Yes, it must be,” he continued. “There’s the root I tied to.”
“Somebody came along and helped himself, that’s all there is to it,” declared Ned.
“Maybe it just floated off,” guessed Zu-zu.
“No, it couldn’t; or else it would have come our way, with the current, you know, Zu-zu,” corrected Tom. “I call that a downright mean trick, to take our boat like this.”
“But we did the very same thing, ourselves. The boat wasn’t ours in the first place,” retorted Zu-zu, daringly.
“Well, the only thing to do is to follow on up the slough, and if we don’t come across the boat we’ll have to wait for somebody to take us over to the paper-mill,” spoke Ned.
They followed Catfish until they reached its head, where it branched off from Paper-mill Slough. They caught not a glimpse of the Black Swan. As they reached the shore the Beaufort whistles were blowing six o’clock. The sun was slipping behind a heavy bank of clouds, and dusk was at hand. The three could not make out a single person anywhere near them, to succor them, and standing there upon the muddy strand, with darkness closing in, and with nothing to eat and no place to sleep, they felt like forlorn, shipwrecked sailors.
Bob, however, curled himself in a ball, and went into a shivery doze.
“Here come some people,” announced Tom.