“Oh, I’m used to hard beds. I can sleep anywhere—on the deck or a bench, one as well as the other.”
“I say, have you ever been up as high as this before?”
“No, never higher than the town. It’s all as fresh to me as to you.”
“Then we go up a river to-morrow?”
“I suppose so. Old Shaddy has it all his own way, and he keeps dropping hints about what he is going to take us to see.”
“And I daresay it will all turn out nothing. What he likes may not suit us. But there, we shall see.”
Then they sat in silence, listening to the rustlings and whistlings in the air as of birds and great moths flitting and gliding about; the shrieks, howls, and yells from across the river; and to the great plungings and splashings in the black water, whose star-gemmed bosom often showed waves with the bright reflections rising and falling, and whose surface looked as if the fire-flies had fallen in all up the river after their giddy evolutions earlier in the night, and were now floating down rapidly toward the sea.
Rob broke the silence at last.
“How is it this stream always runs so fast?” he said.
“Because the waters come from the mountains. There’s a great waterfall, too, higher up, where the whole river comes plunging down hundreds of feet with a roar that can be heard for miles.”