Horror stricken at the details of such a wicked state of things, Dot could not for the moment reply. They heard faintly a shrill voice—evidently of the "Lowise" formerly addressed by the canalboatman.
"Look out, Pap! Low bridge! Goin' to stop at Purdy's to git that mess of 'taters he said he'd have ready for us?"
There was a grumbling reply from the man.
"Dunno. It's rainin' so hard. Might's well keep right on to Durginville, I reckon, Lowise."
"Durginville!" murmured Sammy. "My! that's a long way off, Dot!"
"And are you going to let 'em carry us off this way?" demanded the little girl in growing alarm and disgust. "Why, I thought you were a pirate!"
If pirates were such dreadful people as Sammy had just intimated, she wanted to see him exercise some of that savagery in this important matter. Dot Kenway had not considered being kidnapped and carried away from Milton when she set forth to be a pirate's mate. She expected him to defend her from disaster.
Sammy saw the point. It was "up to him," and he was too much of a man to shirk the issue. After all, he realized that, although actually led away from home by this determined little girl, he was the one who had fully understood the enormity of what they were doing. In his own unuttered but emphatic phrase, "She was only a kid."
"All right, Dot," he declared with an assumption of confidence that he certainly did not feel. "I'll see about our getting out of this right away. Of course we won't want to go to Durginville. And it's stopping raining now, anyway, I guess."
The sound of the thunder was rolling away into the distance. But other sounds, too, seemed to have retreated as Sammy climbed the ladder to reach the hatch-cover. The hatchway was all of six feet square. The heavy plank cover that fitted tightly over it, was a weight far too great for a ten year old boy to lift.