Scoop got his eyes on me.
“What’s the matter, Jerry? Are you cold?”
“Cold and scared both,” I admitted, my teeth chattering.
He looked me over.
“I should think you would be cold in your underwear and shoes. Why don’t you put on the nightshirt?”
“Aw!…”
“Go ahead. Shucks! What do you care how you look?” he urged, reading my thoughts.
None of us had been wearing stockings with our shoes. And I realized now that my bare legs were colder in the damp night air than I had imagined. So I acted on the other’s advice and [[187]]got into the long white nightshirt. It was a big help to me, I found, in keeping my legs warm.
Coming to the big wide waters, we had a moonlight view of the island to our right. A thing that puzzled us was the occasional flicker of a campfire on the rise where the bonds had been buried. While we were discussing the campfire a rowboat came into sight around the head of the island. For all we knew to the contrary the boat’s occupant was an officer bent on our capture. So the thing for us to do, we wisely concluded, was to get out of sight.
After an elapse of several minutes we detected the sound of oarlocks. We could hear, too, in the approach of the boat, the intermittent swish! swish! of the rower’s blades as they bit into the water. It appeared that the boat was heading up the canal in the direction of the lock where we had been held prisoners. This strengthened our belief that the rower was probably the Ashton policeman, on his way to his brother’s house.