He arrived at the mouth of the creek, up which he had located the pop-popping of a stationary engine a half hour later. Taking a chance of being seen, he began skirting the bushes at the edge of the creek. For this move he was thankful. He had not gone a mile when, upon rounding a cocoanut palm that overhung the water, he came in sight of two long, dark objects that lay close to shore, half concealed by foliage. Seen from a little distance they resembled nothing quite so much as great, black water snakes asleep by the bank.
“Pit-pans!” he murmured as he came closer.
Pit-pans indeed they were, slender boats cut from the trunk of a tree, sixty or more feet in length.
“Blockade runners! Black devils!” he muttered as he passed. He dared not stop to inspect them. There might be men on the bank, watching.
Soon he caught the pop-pop of that stationary engine which had once so mystified him. This time, instead of turning back, he paddled straight on. A mile, two, three miles of water passed beneath his craft. Still he moved steadily forward until, when it seemed he must be almost upon the engine, he suddenly discovered that the sound was behind and to the right of him.
“Back in the bush,” he told himself. “Passed the trail without seeing it.”
Turning his boat about, he drifted slowly.
“There it is. Drift down thirty yards and hide my boat.”
This done, he struggled back along the bank to the entrance of the path.
Following a winding trail, with the sound of the motor growing louder, ever louder, with his heart keeping tune to its throbbing, he made his way forward until caution bade him slink into the shadows of the great leaves of a cohune tree.