Five minutes later they were off, Jack at the wheel piloting the launch carefully over the sandbars that in places came nearly to the surface. Once or twice the Corsair scraped her keel and once they had to make their way through a patch of eel-grass and Jack told Hal to throw the clutch into neutral so the long green strands would not bind the propeller. They poled through the grass with an oar and went on again, the river narrowing every minute but growing no shallower. By the time they had followed the winding stream for a mile or so the banks on either side had become so high that it was only by craning their necks that they could see over them. The sun, although not actually visible, was filling the afternoon world with a golden haze and making itself felt if not seen. Here in the river, cut off from the breezes that slightly swayed the grasses on the edges of the banks, the heat was almost intolerable, while the mosquitoes, which hovered about the launch like a cloud, were, to use Bee’s phrase, blood-thirsty and ferocious. The Corsair had to proceed slowly and cautiously both because of the shallows and of the abrupt turns and the boys were beginning to despair of ever reaching their destination when Jack, pointing ahead, called their attention to some rotting spiles standing on either side of the stream.
“There’s the old bridge,” he explained, “or what’s left of it. There used to be a sort of a cart-road through here. Anybody that wanted to could cut the marsh hay in those days and there used to be lots of teams over here. Bill Glass’s place can’t be much further, for we’re almost up to the railroad, I think. Climb up there, Bee, and see what you can see, will you?”
Bee balanced himself on the forward decking, fighting mosquitoes, and gazed about him. “A house about a half-mile over that way,” he reported. “At least, it’s sort of a house. And one to our right, a small cabin; two of them; or maybe one’s a shed.”
“They can’t both be on the river,” objected Jack.
“No, the first one’s away back, near the railroad. The other one’s on the river, I think. I guess we’ll fetch it in a few minutes. It looks as if it might be the pirate’s castle—or a pig-stye!”
“The other one is probably a Portugee shack,” said Jack. “There are several of them along the railroad. Any other cabin near Bill Glass’s?”
“Don’t see any. No, it’s the only one around. There’s a cluster of huts away down the track, but they’re a mile or more away. I guess we’ll get to Bill’s just around this turn, Jack. I don’t see how he lives here with all these mosquitoes, tough as he is!”
“If a mosquito bit Bill Glass,” growled Hal, “good-bye, mosquito.”
The river—although it was absurd to call it a river any longer since, as the Irishman put it, you could jump it in two jumps—broadened a little and the banks were lower; one could see across the broad expanse of salt-marsh and flats without straining one’s neck out of place. The Corsair chugged quietly and slowly around a long bend and suddenly two things happened; a heron—at least, Jack said it was a heron—took flight from the ledges with a startling beating of wings, and a little wharf jutted out from the bank just ahead.