Sam chuckled jubilantly at this support.
“It’d be a big job to build that raft,” said Joe. “There’s plenty of timber and nails, to be sure, but what about lumber for joining and flooring it?”
“Tear this old cabin to pieces!” Bob exclaimed. “We won’t need it any more.”
“Good idea! That’ll certainly give us all the boards we want,” said Joe, and he laughed. “What a joke on Blue Bob, if he comes back here and finds the rosin, bees, and cabin all gone!”
The plan seemed more and more possible as they discussed it. The heavy rain ceased while they talked; the fire burned down, and they at last retired to their damp couches and slept. But they were up early in the morning, and, after a hasty breakfast, they went out to look over the resources of timber.
The morning was clear, and the sun came up brilliantly. The bayou had risen considerably with the rain and flowed with a muddy and perceptible current. As Sam had said, there were plenty of fallen cypress logs along the bayou, as well as dead standing trunks, and the sloping bank would make it easy to get them into the water.
“I vote that we try it,” said Joe at last. “It seems to be our only chance to get away with the bees. We’ll have to cut out the logs for the body of the raft first, and then pull down the cabin, rush the bees aboard, and start quick.”
Without any delay they set to work, with muscles that had scarcely recovered from the stiffness of loading the rosin. Unfortunately they had only one ax, but they kept that busy. For twenty minutes Sam chopped furiously, then passed the ax to Joe, who in turn relinquished it to Bob. Then, while one chopped, the others rolled logs into convenient places, and began to pull out nails from the cabin walls and make what other preparations they could.
By dinner-time they had cut up ten twelve-foot logs and rolled them down to the water. All that afternoon they toiled hard, and all the next day. They were haunted with the idea that Blue Bob and his men might return at this last, critical moment. The sound of the echoing ax was dangerous; it would surely draw the river-men if they were within hearing, and the boys kept nervously on the alert, never without a weapon at hand.
But they were not interrupted in any way, and in two days they had forty stout logs of dry cypress cut out, which, as Bob said, looked enough to float a church.