However, they set to work to get what they could. Stiffened muscles gradually suppled again, and they shoveled and wheeled, poled the boat and shifted the cargo, all through that hot, sticky morning. They struck work for an hour at noon, then attacked it again, doggedly determined to finish that afternoon. About four o’clock they stopped for more food. The furious work seemed to keep them always ravenously hungry.
“It’s a good thing we’re leaving presently,” Alice remarked. “There’s just about provisions to last us. This is the end of the sugar.”
“Plenty of honey,” said Joe. “We won’t suffer for sweet anyhow.”
A dash of rain came down that afternoon and cooled the air. By sunset the barge had about as much rosin as she could carry, Joe thought, though there were still a good many cubic feet left in the pile. They ventured to bring down another boat-load, then another, and stopped for supper, undecided whether to continue after dark. But while they we’re eating they were all startled by a long, deep-toned murmur, like a vast echo, that seemed to rise from every direction upon the air.
“The steamboat, by jingo!” ejaculated Joe. “She’s a day ahead of her schedule this time.”
“And we haven’t got the barge down to the river. We’ll miss her!” Alice cried.
“Oh, she won’t be along for hours yet,” Joe reassured. “Plenty of time to finish supper, and then meet her. But this puts an end to mining out any more rosin.”
“Don’t you reckon we’ve done a thousand barrels, Mr. Joe?” Sam demanded anxiously from the background, where he was eating corn-bread and honey.
“When it’s all melted down and barreled up it may make half that,” the woods-rider answered. “Hard to guess. But isn’t that good enough? It ought to bring three thousand dollars.”
The far-away steamboat blew again as he was speaking. Growing anxious, Carl went up to the top of the ridge to look and listen. He reported that the wind was blowing the wrong way; the boat might be nearer than they thought, and he imagined he had caught a distant flash of her searchlight.