"Oh," said Hugh, "you go to bed, Charlie; you're like a cow-puncher I once knew. He called himself a fatalist, and said that he believed 'whatever was to be would be, whether it happened so or not.'"
Fannin said: "The only thing I am afraid of for to-night is that maybe this tide will rise so high that it will drown us out, and we will be floated off among this drift."
When they turned in, the fire, by which dinner had been cooked, was still glowing brightly under the old drift log against which Charlie had built it; and the only sound heard in camp was the lapping of the water against the beach.
That night Jack had a curious dream. He thought that he was asleep in his room at his home in Thirty-eighth street, when suddenly he was awakened by a bright light, and, rushing to the window, saw that the house across the street was blazing and that a number of policemen clad in white were dancing in front of the fire. As he watched them, and wondered anxiously about the fire, the smoke from the house seemed to turn and move in a thick cloud straight into his window, causing him to choke and cough. At this Jack awoke, and sitting up in his blanket he saw the great drift log, against which the fire had been built, glowing like a furnace. Charlie, clad only in his shirt and drawers, was darting about with a bucket of water in his hands, dashing it on the flames. The fire was soon put out; and next morning, on reckoning up their losses, it was found that they were not very serious. A few cooking utensils, a towel or two, and a coat were the only things seriously damaged. If the fire had burned a little longer and communicated itself to the rest of the drift stuff, the members of the party might have been very uncomfortable, and their loss might have been serious.
When they started the next morning, the surface of the water was smooth and unbroken. There was no breath of air, and great clouds obscured the sky. Before them was seen the white lighthouse of Port Atkinson, and on either side of the channel they were following rose a low, rock-bound, fir-fringed coast. Here, for almost the first time since the trip had been begun, no striking mountain ridges or snow-capped peaks were seen. The tide was running straight against them, and they had to work hard to advance at all. After they had passed the Port Atkinson lighthouse the Inlet broadened and spread out over wide flats. The canoe kept close to the shore, to avoid the ebbing tide, and startled from the grassy shore a number of blue herons which were resting or fishing at the water's edge. Sometimes, as they rounded a little point, a group of hogs were encountered, eagerly rooting in the bare flats for shell-fish. The first one of these groups that he saw astonished Jack, because the hogs were accompanied by a number of crows. About each hog, on the ground or resting on its back, or flying about it with tumultuous cries, were three or four black-winged attendants, which wrangled bitterly over the fragments of fish that the pig unearthed and failed to secure. Sometimes a crow would pounce on a clam or other edible morsel actually under the nose of the hog, and would snatch it away before the hog realized what was happening.