“It could be, and is!” said Johnny emphatically. “I haven’t ridden that old river for nothing. She has a way of teasing and tossing your dugout while she whirls it forward that no other river ever had.
“Besides,” he added with another chuckle, “I can smell the water. It actually _smells_ black.”
“What’s that?” the girl exclaimed suddenly.
It was thunder, the forerunner of a storm. It was not a local storm, either, but one of those wide sweeping storms that tear at the timber on all the headwaters of a great river. Pant, at the edge of his camp, where he was assisting in shooting the last of the mahogany logs into their boom, heard it and his face grew thoughtful.
The hour of great suspense came at last. Their boom was loaded. They were ready to go down the river. Daego had not yet led his men to the attack.
“We’ll get away in the darkness,” Pant said to his Carib foreman, fairly dancing about in his eagerness to be away. “We’ll give old Daego the slip.”
Tivoli’s only reply was a sweep of the hand toward the blackening sky. As if in answer to his signal, there came crashing down upon them one of those sudden storms that are known only in the tropics.
“We’ll get away under cover of the storm,” said Pant. “That will be better still.”
“You don’t now these tropical storms,” said Tivoli. “All night in the rain fifteen men must work; fifteen men must rest, sleep beneath canvas in hammocks. Even with fifteen men we may not save the raft, tied up right here. You do not know the tropics. There will be water in the river, water in the sky. Which is river? Which is sky? You cannot tell. The river will rise like a tide. There will come down snags, great trees, palm trees, mahogany, yamra, black tamarind, santa maria, many, many snags. All night long, at the edge of the raft, we must fight these snags away. There will be no sleep for Tivoli tonight, and perhaps no logs for Mr. Johnny Thompson after that, either.”
Tivoli was right. Such a storm as this was! Nothing of the kind had ever been witnessed by the boys before. Flash after flash of lightning, water in sheets, in streams, great avalanches of water that one could all but swim through. Rolling thunder vied with the increasing roar of black waters. And after that came the snags! And how those Caribs did work!