Raftmates: A Story of the Great River Page 14

  CHAPTER XIII.

  WINN'S LONELY CRUISE.

  During the half-hour that Winn allowed to elapse before he consideredit safe to rise from his recumbent position in the bottom of the skiff,he had ample opportunity to recover his breath, and reflect upon thenew situation into which he had been so strangely forced. At first hefancied that he heard sounds of pursuit, and momentarily expected to begreeted by a stern order from the bank to bring the skiff ashore. Hewondered if a failure to comply would be followed by a rifle-shot, andthen began to calculate the chances of being hit in such a case. Butwhy should he be shot at? What had he done that he should be arrested,threatened with jail and hanging, and treated like an outlaw generally?Whom did these men take him for? and who were they? By the manner inwhich they had spoken of a judge, they must represent the law in someway; but why he should be an object of their pursuit puzzled the boymore than a little.

  To be sure, he had now laid himself open to the suspicion of being ariver thief, by carrying off their skiff. Would it not be well toreturn it at once? He could talk to them, and explain how he happenedto be on the island, while still at such a distance from shore as to bebeyond their reach. They might shoot, though, and if they reallyconsidered him the rascal they pretended, it was almost certain thatthey would. No, that plan would not work. The only thing left to bedone was to take the skiff to Dubuque, telegraph to his father fromthere, or try and find one of the Major's friends in that city whowould do so for him, and at the same time provide him with food andshelter until his father came. Yes, that was the best plan.

  Having reached this determination, Winn sat up and looked about him.The light which he had mistaken for dawn was that of a late-risingmoon, and it hardly penetrated the mist hanging low over the river.There was nothing in sight; not even the dark mass of timber on theisland. Winn might have been in the middle of the ocean for all thathe could see or hear. Never in his life had the boy felt so utterlyforsaken and alone. He decided to pull diagonally across the currenttowards shore, the mere sight of which would be reassuring. But wherewere the oars? Until this moment he had not noticed that there werenone in the boat. For some unknown reason they had been taken from itwhen the party landed on the island; and now the lonely navigator wasutterly without the means of propelling or even guiding his craft. Hetried to tear up one of the floor boards, with the idea of using it asa paddle; but it was nailed in place so firmly as to resist his utmostefforts. Finally, faint for want of food, exhausted, and disheartened,the poor boy threw himself in the bottom of the skiff and yielded tohis despair. At length he fell asleep.

  So the dawn of Winn's second day on the river caught him napping, asthe first had done. In its gray light the skiff drifted past thelittle city of Dubuque, perched high on the bluffs of the western bank,but no one saw it. There were several steamboats and trading scowstied to the narrow levee, but their crews were still buried in slumber.Even had they been awake they would hardly have noticed the littlecraft far out in the stream, drifting with the hurrying waters. In afew minutes it was gone, and the sleeping city was none the wiser forits passing. So for hours it drifted, now bow on, then broadside to,and as often stern first; here caught and spun round by an eddy, thentossed aside and allowed to proceed on its unguided course. Thecotton-woods on the tow-heads beckoned to it with their tremblingfingers; but it paid no heed. Grim snags lay in wait for it, but itnimbly avoided them, and as the hours passed each one of them saw thedrifting skiff some miles farther away from the island at which thisstrange voyage was begun.

  When Winn finally awoke, he was so bewildered, and so much at a loss toaccount for his surroundings, that for a minute he lay motionless,collecting his scattered senses. It certainly was late in the day, forthe sun was shining full upon him from high in the heavens. He hadthat comfort at least; but oh! how he ached from lying on that hardfloor, and how faint he was from hunger.

  The boy's head rested on a thwart, and he faced the after-end of theskiff. As he was about to rise, his glance fell on something wrappedin newspaper and tucked under the stern seat. If it should only proveto be food of any description, "even burned mush," thought Winn,grimly, how happy it would make him! In another second he was undoing,with eager fingers, the lunch of crackers and cheese that SheriffRiley's wife had so thoughtfully thrust into her husband's hands as heleft the house the morning before, and which he had as thoughtfullytucked under the stern seat of his skiff. He was probably thinking ofit, and wishing he had it, at this very moment. As for Winn, he waseating it as fast as possible, and thinking that he had never tastedsuch good crackers or such a fine piece of cheese in his life. Witheach mouthful his spirits rose and his strength returned, until, whenthe last crumb had disappeared and been washed down with a doublehandful of sweet river-water, the boy's pluck and cheerfulness werefully restored.

  Now what should he do? He did not know that he had passed Dubuque,though he feared that such might be the case. Thinking of it broughtto mind the island with those upon whom he had so recently turned thetables, and left as prisoners within its limits. He even laughed aloudas he pictured them toiling, as he had toiled the evening before, toconstruct a raft on which to escape. "I wonder if they found any onein that log-hut," he thought, recalling its lighted window. "And, oh!if it should have been father! It might have been. He might have seenmy signal-fire, found my message, and got as far as the hut. Now whatwill he do? Oh, how I wish I could get back! Why didn't I think ofall this before leaving the island? That was a horrid sound in thewoods, though. And that animal! I wonder what it could have been?"

  By this time the current had carried the skiff close in to the drownedbottom-lands of the Illinois shore. They were covered with a heavygrowth of timber, and Winn knew that in many places the wellnighimpassable swamps which this concealed extended back a mile or morefrom the channel. Otherwise he would have abandoned the skiff and madethe attempt to swim ashore.

  The Iowa bluffs rose invitingly on the opposite side of the river. Onthem he saw a few scattered settlements, but they were too far away,and he must wait until the current set him in that direction beforethinking of making a landing. He saw an occasional ferry-boat makingits slow way across the river, but it was always either too far abovehim or too far below him for his signals to be noticed, and so thehours dragged on until it was late afternoon, and Winn was againbeginning to feel the pangs of hunger.

  "I can't spend another night in this wretched boat!" he exclaimedaloud, when he saw that the sun was within an hour of its setting."I'll swim the whole width of the river first!"

  During the day he had passed a number of small islands, but had notcared to attempt a landing on them. He knew that he would be evenworse off on an island than in the skiff, and so he had watched themglide by without giving them any particular thought. Suddenly itoccurred to him that on any one of these islands he might pick up anoar, a paddle, or at least something that would answer in place ofthese, and from that instant they acquired a new interest.

  The next one that he approached was only a tow-head, which is asand-bar on which has sprung up a thick growth of slender cotton-woods,or other quick-shooting, water-loving trees.

  "I might find what I want there as well as on a larger island," thoughtWinn, "and, at any rate, I'll make a try for it." So when the skiffhad drifted as near the tow-head as it seemed likely to, and wasrapidly sliding past it, the boy threw off his coat, kicked off hisshoes, and, taking one end of the skiff's painter with him, plungedoverboard and began to swim towards the desired point.

  The distance was not more than a hundred feet, but the current swepthim down so much more rapidly than he expected that he was barely ableto catch one of the very last of the tow-head saplings and cling to it.While his own progress was thus checked, that of the skiff was not, andin a second the painter was jerked from his hand.

  Exhausted as he was, Winn was on the point of letting go his hold onthe sapling and making a desperate effort to overtake the ra
pidlyreceding skiff. Fortunately he had enough practical sense, though thisis not generally credited to sixteen-year-old boys, to restrain himfrom such a rash act. So he crawled out on the sand beach, and satthere watching what he considered to be his only hope grow smaller andsmaller until it finally disappeared. As it did so, the sun slowlysank behind the western bluffs; and though the boy did not look up fromthe wet sand on which he had flung himself, he knew instinctively thatanother night, with its darkness, its chill, and its nameless terrors,was upon him.

  He was so numbed by this latest disaster that he had not the heart evento seek a place of shelter for the night. What good would anythingthat he could find or construct do him? He had neither matches norfood, dry clothing nor bedding. What did it matter, though? He wouldprobably be dead before the sun rose again, anyway. So the poor ladnursed his misery, and might, in truth, have lain on those wet sandsuntil he perished, so despairing was he, when all at once he wasaroused by a sound so strange to hear in that place that, though heraised his head to listen, he thought he must be dreaming. He wasn't,though, for there came again to his ears, as distinct as anything everheard in his life, a merry peal of clear girlish laughter. Not onlythat, but it sounded so close at hand that the boy sprang to his feetand gazed eagerly in the direction from which it came, fully expectingto see its author standing near him.