After that they settled down to wait. The storm must surely come to an end before a great while, and as they were now moving at less than one-half the mad pace they had been going before that drag had been instituted, it seemed perfectly safe even to Buster.
“All I hope for now is that we don’t run afoul of some half-sunken rock, or it may be a snag!” Josh was heard to say.
“We do know there are snags floating along, because you remember I struck one only yesterday,” ventured Buster, referring, of course, to the log which, by catching his trailing fish hook, had dragged him overboard.
“Not much danger of that,” Jack assured them; “they keep a pretty clear channel over here, it seems, even if we haven’t met steamboats on the river like you would on the Mississippi. Given another ten minutes or so and I think we’ll see the break in the storm we expect. It can hardly last much longer now.”
“Must have done some damage ashore, too, boys?” suggested George.
“So long as it hasn’t killed off all the chickens, so we can’t get any more eggs, that doesn’t really concern us, I s’pose,” said Buster, not meaning to be unfeeling in the least, but just then that seemed to be in the nature of a calamity in his mind.
Slowly the time passed, but the boys were soon delighted to discover that there was actually a slackening up of the elements that had combined to make such a furious discord. The thunder became less boisterous, the wind lulled perceptibly, and even the waves had lost much of their force.
Jack, taking an observation, made an important discovery, and followed it with an announcement that gave his comrades considerable pleasure.
“There’s a break in the storm clouds over there in the west, boys, and I guess we’ve got to the end of this trouble!”
“With no damage done except a wetting for two of us,” added Josh, trying to act as though that counted for next to nothing, considering the benefits that had probably sprung from the work of Jack and himself.