Joe did not answer, gazing anxiously about him. He had an impression that they might encounter the houseboat at any turning, and his nerves and eyes were on the strain. He let Sam and Bob paddle, while he sat in the bow, holding his rifle cocked and ready, though he had no idea of provoking hostilities if they could do their scouting unobserved. But no houseboat appeared; and the channel, as it wound and twisted sinuously through the swamp, gave no sign that anybody had ever passed that way before.
Presently a bayou twenty feet wide opened at one side, apparently leading toward the interior of the island.
“Let’s push in here. Looks like just the place they’d hide in,” said Joe in a low voice.
They pushed in. The bayou water was black and almost stagnant. Ricks of dead trees lay on the shores or half in the water. Queer pink cypress “knees” protruded through the mud. A long, brilliantly green snake wound swiftly through and through the branches, turning his head toward the stealthy canoe. A pair of wild ducks spattered up and rushed noisily through the air. The boys felt that they were hot on the trail, pausing behind every thicket of titi or palmetto and peering ahead; but within fifty yards further the way was completely blocked by a jam of fallen cypresses tangled together with bamboo-vine. Clearly the houseboat had never passed that way.
Disappointed, they had to turn back. A few rods further down the channel a second bayou opened into the swamp. This one led them by intricate windings for a great distance, until they arrived suddenly at a wide stream, and they realized that they had come back into the old river channel again.
The strain of keeping intensely on the alert, half expecting at any moment to be shot at from ambush, began to tell on all of them.
“Dis here’s shore ’nough one tangle!” remarked Sam, gloomily.
“It’s worse than our bee-hunting,” said Bob, surveying the dismal labyrinth.
It was so hot that mosquitoes had suddenly become unseasonably plentiful, too. But they persevered, and after a few more side excursions that always ended in a tangle of fallen logs or a sudden shoaling into mud, they came at last to a wider channel that opened from the main stream. A brisk current was setting down it, and they steered the canoe into it, once more with expectation. For several hundred yards they traveled between a dense wall of swamp trees, cloudy with Spanish moss that almost met overhead. Then the current slackened, and the stream widened into a broad pond.
It was a most dismal and depressing place. Dead cypresses and black-gum trees broke the surface of the lagoon, and the putty-colored water was full of snags and slimy branches. They paddled all around it, without finding any way out. There must have been an outlet somewhere, but there seemed no passage for the canoe.