“Fetches us inside ten miles, don' it? Might a took the fork to Po'tsmouth. But you better watch your boats, landlo'd.”
Someone else said:
“Hot work down the river,” meaning the cannonading.
The cannonading kept up its beat and thrill all through the afternoon. It was the 8th of March. We did not know anything peculiar about the 8th of March. There was an iron-sided thing careering around the James River the while, and eating up tall ships, and feeling much too comfortable over it. We were thinking about Gerry, and the landlord, and the boats.
Towards dusk someone came stamping and puffing in the bushes, and we made out that he was come to hide the oars back among the brakes and leaves. We argued it must be the landlord, who seemed to be fat and short of wind, as well as deaf.
We waited again a long time. Calhoun rose once and peered about, but lay down again and said there was still a light at the hotel. At last everything was dark and silent, so far as we could make out.
We crept along till we found the oars, thrust here and there among the brakes, and took four of them, and so out into the starlight on the beach. I stepped into a boat, and Calhoun shoved the prow. But we had surely made a noise—some unnoticed clatter of oars—for the feet of men were coming now, thumping and stamping down the path. Calhoun shoved and leaped in, and we shot out over the shallow. But one of the men ran across the strip of beach into the water and caught the prow; and Calhoun thrust with his oar handle, so that he fell over and made a splash; and we got the oars in and rowed away.
They were the landlord and two other men. The two others fell to shouting in the landlord's ear, “Oars! oars!” and all three ran into the bushes. We had gotten away so far that the shore was too dim to see, but I thought they had given up. Calhoun listened and heard their oarlocks. So we fell to, and pulled till my ears sang and my arms felt wooden, north by west, down the river, which was there broad like a bay; and we kept this pace some two miles, and were near the island they call Craney Island, where were Confederate batteries.
They were good watermen. They out-rowed us fairly, drew nearer and nearer till I could see that there were two in the stem with an oar apiece, and the third man pulling two oars.
“They've got no guns,” said Calhoun. “They'd have drawn on us.”