“Captain Joe ought to be here before long,” Case observed searching the thickets with his eyes in the hope of discerning the bulky form of the dog. “It is a rare thing for him to go away alone, but when he has done so in the past he soon returns.”
“I wish he’d come back right now,” Jule replied, “I’m so sleepy I couldn’t eat a breakfast if we had one. Look here, Case,” he went on, “why is it that we always have such infernal bad luck when we start out on a river trip? Its been night-and-day trouble ever since we left Pittsburgh.”
“Yes,” Case replied, “and it was night-and-day trouble on the Amazon, and on the Columbia, and on the Colorado, and on the Mississippi, and on the St. Lawrence. I’ll tell you what I think we ought to do,” he continued with a grin, “we ought to take an aeroplane along so we could mount up into the blue sky when things got mixed.”
“I wouldn’t mind being several miles up in the blue sky right now,” Jule laughed, “if I could find a nice soft cloud to sleep on. They look like feather beds, don’t they?” he asked, pointing to wandering clouds in the sky some of them tipped with the early sunlight.
“They certainly do,” answered Case, “but I’m afraid you wouldn’t find them very soft or very dry. In fact, you’d fall right through and probably tumble into the river. Did it ever occur to you,” he went on, “that a cloud is a great big bluff? It looks solid and handsome, and all that, from the surface of the earth, but it’s nothing but a great big fog.”
“I never lost much time considering clouds, Jule replied. “Suppose you go out into the woods and see if you can’t find Captain Joe.”
“No use to look for him,” Case replied, “if he’s got the trail of a rabbit, he’ll run from now until next week at two o’clock.”
“Then let’s go to sleep,” Jule proposed. “We can lie right down here in the thicket, and if anyone should come poking around, they wouldn’t be able to see us. We didn’t have any sleep last night at all, you know.”
“I don’t know what’s the matter with the bunch, anyway,” Case said, rather crossly. “Clay goes off to get breakfast and doesn’t come back, and Alex goes out to get fish and gets chased off by a coal tow, and Captain Joe runs away and doesn’t return!”
“Alex ought to be here by this time,” Jule complained. “There’s plenty to eat on board the Rambler, so if Clay doesn’t find any provisions we won’t go hungry. Everything seems to be going wrong.”