Captain Sam | Page 5

long time Jake crept away noiselessly, as he had come.
Slipping down over the low sand bank he stood by the river's edge with the boots in his
hand.
"Now," he muttered to himself, "I guess I'll be even with 'Captain Sam.' By the time he
marches a day or two barefoot with that game foot o' his'n, I guess he'll begin to wish he
hadn't been quite so sassy."
Filling the boots with sand he swung them back and forth, meaning to toss them as far out
into the river as he could. Just as he was about quitting his hold of them, a terrifying
thought seized him. The sand-filled boots would make a good deal of noise in striking the
water, and Sam on the bank above would be sure to hear. Jake was ready enough to injure
Sam, but he was not by any means ready to encounter that particularly cool and
determined youth, while engaged in the act of doing him a surreptitious injury. He must
go higher up the stream before putting his purpose into execution.
The bank at this point was crowned with a great pile of drift wood, the accumulation of
many floods, which had been caught and held in its place by two great trees from the
roots of which the water had gradually washed the sand away until the trees themselves
stood up upon great root legs, fifteen feet long. The trees and the drift pile were the same
in which Sam Hardwicke had hidden his little party a year before, when the fortunes of
Indian war had thrown him, with Tom and his sister, and the black boy Joe, upon their
own resources in the Indian haunted forest. The story is told in a former volume of this
series.[1] Sam's resting place just now was within a few feet of the great tree roots, but
Sam was not sleeping there, as Jake Elliott supposed. He had been wide enough awake,
ever since Jake first startled him out of sleep, and he had silently observed that worthy's
manoeuvres through the bushes. Jake crept along the edge of the drift pile to its further
end, intending to toss the boots into the river as soon as he should be sufficiently far from
Sam for safety. As he went, however, his awakened caution grew upon him. He reflected
that Sam would suspect him when he should miss his boots the next morning, and might

see fit to call him to account for their absence. He intended, in that case, stoutly to deny
all knowledge of the affair, but he could not tell in advance precisely how persistent
Sam's suspicion might be, and it seemed to him better to leave himself a "hole to crawl
through," as he phrased it, if the necessity should come. He resolved, therefore, that
instead of throwing the boots away, he would hide them so securely that no one else
could possibly find them. "Then," thought he, "if the worst comes to the worst I can find
'em, and still stick to it that I didn't take 'em away." An opening in the pile of drift-wood
just at hand, was suggestive, and Jake crept into it passing under a great log that lay
lengthwise just over the entrance. The passage way through the drift was a very narrow
one but it did not come to an end at the end of the great log as Jake had expected, and he
felt his way further. The passage turned and twisted about, but he went on, dark as it was.
After a while he found himself in a sort of chamber under one of the great trees, and
inside the line of its great twisted roots. He did not know where he was, however, but
Sam or Tom or Joe could have told him all about the place.
[Footnote 1: The Big Brother, published by G. P. Putnam's Sons. A friend suggests that
many northern readers may doubt the existence of such trees as those which I have
described briefly here, and more fully in "The Big Brother." I think it right to explain,
therefore, that I have seen many such trees with roots exposed in the manner described, in
the west and south, and my favorite playing place as a boy was under precisely such a
tree. Of course no tree could stand the sudden removal of ten or fifteen feet of earth from
beneath it; but the trees described have gradually undergone this process, and the roots
have struck constantly deeper, their exposed parts gradually changing from roots, in the
proper sense, to something like a downward-branching tree trunk.]
[Illustration: GETTING EVEN IN THE DARK.]
Here his journey seemed to be effectually interrupted, and he thrust the boots, as he