As Quorum sat and watched them, a broad grin of happiness overspread his features, while wreaths of blue smoke curled gently upward above his woolly head. His pipe was again full, and he now had possession of an entire plug of tobacco, for which he felt profoundly grateful to some unknown benefactor.
Among other things in the hut, which the boys now called the storehouse, they had discovered a bale of blankets. These they did not hesitate to appropriate to their own use, and as they lay stretched on them, under their new roof, blinking sleepily at the fire, their comfort and happiness seemed almost to have attained perfection.
"Except for our canoes," said Sumner. "If we only had them, I, for one, should be perfectly happy; and to-morrow I am going to make preparations for finding them."
"How?" asked Worth; and for an hour or so they talked over their plans for the future. The intervals between their remarks became longer and longer, until finally, when Worth asked, "Whom do you suppose all those provisions belong to, anyway, Sumner?" the latter answered: "Give it up. I'm too sleepy to guess any more riddles to-night."
The boys slept almost without moving until sunrise; but Quorum was frequently aroused to repel the invasions of certain 'coons that, but for his watchfulness, would have made free with the contents of the storehouse. He also had to protect the fire against a heavy shower that came on towards morning; and on each of these occasions he rewarded himself with a few whiffs of smoke from his black pipe.
The next morning the two boys, leaving Quorum to devise traps for the capture of the 'coons and prepare dinner, started out to collect some of the planks they had seen the day before. With these Sumner proposed to build a raft on which they could drift over to Indian Key with that afternoon's ebb-tide. Once there, he anticipated no difficulty in hailing some passing craft that could be chartered to search for their canoes, and carry them back to Key West in case the search proved fruitless.
QUORUM IS HAPPY.
As the channel from Lignum Vitæ, through which the strongest tide-currents flowed, led directly past Indian Key and close to it, this plan seemed feasible. By noon the boys had towed around to the cove in front of their camp two heavy squared timbers and a number of boards. These they lashed together in the form of a rude raft. They had no nails, and but a limited supply of line for lashing, so that the raft was by no means so strong as they could wish. Neither was it very buoyant, the material of which it was built being yellow pine, already somewhat water-soaked and floating very low. To their dismay, when it was completed, the boys found that instead of supporting three persons, as they hoped it would, it was awash and unsafe with but two of them on board.
"There's only one thing to be done," said Sumner, when this state of affairs became evident, "and that is for me to go alone. When I get hold of a craft of some kind, I can bring her here after you two; and if I don't find one, it will be an easy matter for me to come back on a flood-tide."