All the others nodded. Everyone was anxious for the perilous task.
"We can swim the river," said Henry, "and, also, we can borrow a small boat from the fleet."
"I wouldn't borrow a boat," said Daniel Boone. "The fewer that know about us the better, even the fewer of our friends. It 'pears to me that if we were to stroll down stream a little we might find a canoe that somebody had left there for a time of need."
Henry smiled. He felt sure that the canoe would be found. But he and the others, without another word, followed Boone for a distance until they came to a point where the banks were low. Then Boone forced his way noiselessly into a patch of bushes that grew at the very water's edge, and Simon Kenton followed him. The two reappeared in a minute, carrying a spacious canoe of birch bark.
"Simon an' me took this," explained Boone, "before we went south for our friends, an' we hid it here, knowin' that we'd have a use for it some time or other. We'll crowd it, but it'll hold us all."
They put the canoe upon the water, and the five got in. Boone and Kenton lifted the paddles, but Tom Ross at once reached over and took the paddle from the hand of Daniel Boone.
"It shan't ever be told uv me," he said, "that I set still in a boat, while Dan'l Boone paddled me across the Ohio."
"An' yet I think I can paddle pretty well," said Daniel Boone in a gentle, whimsical tone.
"'Nuff said," said Tom Ross, as he gave the paddle a mighty sweep that sent the canoe shooting far out into the river. Boone smiled again in his winning way, but said nothing. Kenton, also, swung the paddle with a mighty wrist and arm, and in a few moments they were in the middle of the river. Here the light was greatest, and the two paddlers did not cease their efforts until they were well under the shelter of the northern bank, where the darkness lay thick and heavy again.
Here they stopped and examined river, forest, and shores. The fleet at the southern margin blended with the darkness, but they could dimly see, high upon the cliff, the walls of the fort, and also a few lights that twinkled in the blockhouse or the upper stories of cabins.