“All right, my lass!” said the rough fellow. “I’ll do anything you tells me.”
“Then don’t say ‘my lass’ to me.”
“I won’t if you don’t wish it,” growled Bart. “Here, let me pole her along now.”
“No; sit still. Is that man asleep?”
“Yes; can’t you hear? He’s fagged out like poor old Abel. But let me pole the boat.”
“No; she’ll drift now with the current and we shall be carried out to sea. If the people yonder saw us then they would not know who was in the boat. You have escaped, Bart?”
“Ay, we’ve escaped, my—”
“Hush, I say!” cried Mary, imperiously; and Bart, feeling puzzled, rubbed one ear and sat gazing straight before him into the darkness where he knew the girl to be, his imagination filing up the blanks, till he seemed to see her standing up in the boat, with a red worsted cap perched jauntily upon her raven-black hair, and a tight blue-knitted jacket above her linsey-woolsey skirt, just as he had seen her hundreds of times in her father’s, and then in Abel’s boat at home on the Devon shore.
All at once Bart Wrigley opened his eyes and stared. Had he been asleep and dreamed that he and Abel had escaped, and then that he was in the Dell’s boat, with Mary poling it along?
What could it all mean? He was in a boat, and behind him lay back the soldier with his mouth open, sleeping heavily. On his left was Abel Dell, also sleeping as a man sleeps who is utterly exhausted by some terrible exertion. But that was not the Devon coast upon which the sun was shedding its early morning rays. Dense belts of mangrove did not spread their muddy roots like intricate rustic scaffoldings on southern English shores, and there were no clusters of alligators lying here and there among the mud and ooze.