“This will never do,” exclaimed George, at length. “I can’t stand this any longer. I am getting so cold I can hardly talk plainly.”
“Where shall we go?” asked Bob. “There may not be a house within ten miles of us.”
“I don’t care where we go so long as we keep moving. Let’s take a last look at the Sam Kendall and start out. I hope all the passengers and crew escaped with their lives.”
“So do I, but it is hardly probable. I could have saved every man, woman and child on that forecastle if I could only have made them listen to reason. You and I could have made half a dozen trips with the yawl between the vessel and the shore before she broke in two. Hark! Wasn’t that the bark of a dog?”
The two boys listened a moment, and presently the sound that had attracted Bob’s attention was repeated. It was so faint and far off that they could scarcely hear it, but it put new life into them.
“It is a dog, sure enough,” said George, “and where there is a dog there must be a house somewhere about. Let’s see if we can find him.”
With a farewell glance at the glowing bed of coals that pointed out the wreck of the steamer, the boys crawled to the top of the bank and turned their faces in the direction from which the barking of the dog sounded. They had undertaken a task of considerable difficulty, as they found before they had gone many yards, for the woods were so thick and dark that even Bob, who could find his way in the night almost as well as he could in the daytime, was often at fault. The distant watch-dog was accommodating enough to give a yelp or two for their guidance every few minutes, but they did not seem to be drawing any nearer to him, and finally the animal, as if dissatisfied with the slow progress they were making, became silent.
Bob led the way for a mile or more through darkness so intense that he could not see the nearest trees, and when at length he and his companion became so weary and disheartened that they talked strongly of giving it up as a hopeless task, and sitting down and waiting until daylight came, they worked their way out of a dense thicket through which they had been stumbling for the last ten minutes, and found themselves in a smooth, well-beaten path. They made more rapid headway after this, and when they had gone a few rods farther, Bob announced that he could see a faint light shining through the bushes. It looked to him, he said, as though it was shining through cracks between logs; and if that was the case there must be a house close at hand. Believing that they had stumbled upon the home of the watch-dog, and that he might not like it if he and George approached his master’s dwelling without giving some notice of their presence, Bob halted in the path and shouted out the warning so familiar to every one who has travelled through the rural districts of the South—
“Hallo, the house! Don’t let your dogs bite!”
It was well that Bob was thoughtful enough to take this precaution, for he had scarcely finished his hail when such a chorus of hoarse yelps and growls arose out of the darkness that the boys’ hair fairly stood on end. At the same instant a loud rustling among the leaves and bushes told them that they had aroused, not one dog, but a dozen, and that they were coming. They had nothing with which to defend themselves, and it would have been of no use to run, even if they could have seen which way to go. In a moment more they would have been surrounded by the fierce animals; but just then a door was jerked open, a flood of light streamed out into the darkness, and a bare-headed and bare-footed man appeared with a club in his hand.