In the middle of the night Joe had reason to feel more satisfied. It began to rain. As his rubber blanket was wet, and in that state seemed hotter than ever, Joe could not sleep under the shelter of it, and, as on the previous night, went to sleep with nothing over him but his woollen blanket. His head was underneath the deck, and as the rain began to fall very gently, it did not awaken him until his blanket was thoroughly wet.
He roused himself and sat up. He was startled to see a figure wrapped in a rubber blanket sitting on his deck. “Who’s there?” he asked, suddenly. “Sing out, or I’ll shoot!”
“You can’t shoot with a jack-knife or a tin bailer, so I’m not much afraid of you,” was the reply.
“Oh, it’s you, Tom, is it?” said Joe, much relieved. “What in the world are you doing there?”
“My canoe’s half full of water, so I came out into the rain to get dry.”
“Couldn’t you keep the rain out of the canoe with the rubber blanket?”
“The canoe is fourteen feet long, and hasn’t any deck, and the blanket is six feet long. I had the blanket hung over the paddle, but of course the rain came in at the ends of the canoe.”
“Well, I’m pretty wet, for I didn’t cover my canoe at all. What’ll we do?”
“Sit here till it lets up, I suppose,” replied Tom. “It must stop raining some time.”