They had not yet begun using their paddle, but were drifting with the current, debating upon their course of action.
"I think I understand why he left us," added Howard, after a moment's pause.
"I think we have passed through most of the danger, and he thought we were just as safe without him as with him. Don't you see, Elwood, that we have come a good ways down the river, and we must be near some settlement. I think there is a place called Soledad somewhere along this river, but whether on the eastern or western bank I cannot tell."
"It is a good ways off, I should say fifty miles, and is on the western bank."
"How comes it that _you_ are so well informed?" asked Howard, repeating the question that had been asked him by his cousin when on the steamer.
"It is only accidentally that I know that. A few weeks ago I was comparing an old and new geography and noticed what different views they gave of the western part of our country. The old maps had the Buenaventura so wrong in every particular that I learned considerable about the true one, which you know is called Salinas by most people."
"If we are very careful, I think we can get home without trouble; but although there must be white people--settlers and miners--in these parts, still they are so scattered that we are less likely to see them than we are the Indians."
"Boys," said Tim O'Rooney, who had not let his pipe go out since morning. "Shall I give yez some good advice?"
Both expressed their eagerness to receive it.
"There bees plenty of the rid gintlemen yet in this counthry, and we haven't got beyant them. If we goes paddling in this canoe when the sun is shining overhead, some of 'em will see us, and if we don't put into shore they'll put out after us--that they will."
"That we turns the night into day, and slaaps and smokes and meditates by sunlight, and does our traveling by moonlight, or what is bether, without any light at all."
This proposal suited the boys exactly. It was so plainly dictated by common sense that the wonder was they had not thought of it long before. Elwood took the paddle in his hand and held it poised.
"That is the side where _they_ are," replied Elwood, referring to the Indian party they had passed.