“Shall you be fit?”
Jem was silent for a few minutes.
“I’m like you, Mas’ Don,” he said. “I dunno; but I tell you what, we will not say to-morrow or next day, but make up our minds to go first chance. What do you say to that?”
“Anything is better than being in the power of such wretches as these, Jem; so let’s do as you say.”
Jem nodded his head as he sat in the bottom of the canoe in the broad moonlight, and Don watched the soft silver sea, the black velvet-looking shore, and the brilliant stars; and then, just as in his faintness, hunger, and misery, he had determined in his own mind that he would be obliged to sit there and suffer the long night through, and began wondering how long it would be before morning, he became aware of the fact that Nature is bounteously good to those who suffer, for he saw that Jem kept on nodding his head, as if in acquiescence with that which he had said; and then he seemed to subside slowly with his brow against the side.
“He’s asleep!” said Don to himself. “Poor Jem! He always could go to sleep directly.”
This turned Don’s thoughts to the times when, after a hard morning’s work, and a hasty dinner, he had seen Jem sit down in a corner with his back against a tub, and drop off apparently in an instant.
“I wish I could go to sleep and forget all this,” Don said to himself with a sigh—“all this horror and weariness and misery.”
He shook his head: it was impossible; and he looked again at the dark shore that they were passing, at the shimmering sea, and then at the bronzed backs of the warriors as they paddled on in their drowsy, mechanical way.
The movement looked more and more strange as he gazed. The men’s bodies swayed very little, and their arms all along the line looked misty, and seemed to stretch right away into infinity, so far away was the last rower from the prow. The water flashed with the moonlight on one side, and gleamed pallidly on the other as the blades stirred it; and then they grew more misty and more misty, but kept on plash—plash—plash, and the paddles of the line of canoes behind echoed the sound, or seemed to, as they beat the water, and Jem whispered softly in his ear,—