The Voyage of the Hoppergrass | Page 7

mouth helplessly, once or twice.
"Gosh sakes!" he said, "you warn't in no river. You was in Pingree's
Crik, or you wouldn't have got down here."
"I thought it seemed pretty narrow. But when I got out here--round that
corner--and came out where it's so much broader, I couldn't make the
canoe go at all, except backwards. The front end of her kept swinging
round, for the river was running the wrong way. At last I ran right up
on that island, and then I got out, for my foot had gone to sleep. You
see I hadn't dared to move, the canoe wabbled so. And then I went to
look at some critters that were crawling around in the water,--they
looked like tennis-racquets, only their tails weren't quite big enough--"
"Horse-shoe crabs," said Ed Mason.

"I don't know what they were, but I got quite fascinated watching them,
and the first thing I knew the island had grown smaller--"
"The tide was coming in," explained Jimmy.
"But where is your canoe?" I asked him, "what have you done with it?"
The astonished look came over the young man's face.
"Why, that's so! I wonder where it has gone?"
"Land o' libberty!" said the Captain, "don't yer know?"
"Why, yes, it floated off. While I was watching the tennis-racquet
animals it got loose, somehow--"
"Naturally," observed Captain Bannister, "seein' the tide was risin', an' I
don't s'pose yer pulled it up on the sand."
"And the first thing I knew it was quite a distance from the island."
"Couldn't you have swum for it?" I demanded.
"Yes; but I didn't want to get all wet,--I--"
And then we all looked at his soaked clothes, and he laughed with us.
"Somehow, I didn't think of that when you came along," he admitted.
"But don't you really know where the canoe is?"
'Why, it disappeared around that point, just before I saw your boat. I
really ought to get it again, because Mr. Skeels--that's the name of the
man who owns it--isn't it great? I tried to make up a poem about him as
I came down the river, but I couldn't get any farther than:
There was an old person named Skeels, Who lived upon lobsters and
eels,--

and he did look as if he lived upon lobsters and eels, too. Or WITH
them. Anyhow, he'll be down to Mr. Pike's tomorrow, asking for the
canoe. And my bag, and suit-case, and all my clothes are in it, too. So I
suppose I'll have to find it. Will it go out to sea?"
"It can't," said the Captain, "not till the tide turns. We'll overtake it 'fore
long,--you see if we don't."
Sure enough, we did overtake it. We had hardly passed the point of
land when Jimmy Toppan, who spent most of his time standing in the
bow, peering ahead like Leif Ericsson discovering Vinland, sang out
that he had sighted the canoe. It had drifted into some eel- grass, near
the shore, and we had no trouble in getting it. Beside the bags, there
were in the canoe some large sheets of paper, torn out of a sketch book.
These were covered with pictures of the horse-shoe crabs,--drawn in a
very amusing fashion. One sketch showed an old crab, wearing a
mob-cap and sitting up in bed, drinking tea.
The stranger was delighted to get his belongings. He promptly changed
his wet clothes for a bathing-suit, leaving the wet things in the sun to
dry.
"Now," he said, "I'm all ready to go overboard, but it will be just like
my luck not to fall over at all."
"You stay on the boat," said the Captain, decidedly; "I've rescued you
twice, and that's enough for one day."
"All right, Captain. Though I don't mind being in the water. It's this
desert island business that scares me most to death. There was the
question of food. The--what-do-you-call--'em crabs had all gone away
before you came, and I didn't think much of eating them cold, anyway.
I had a piece of chocolate--"
He laughed and jumped up.
"Here it is," he said, fishing it out from a wet trousers' pocket. "I was
going to divide it so as to have a piece for each day. That's the way

people do when they're shipwrecked, isn't it, Captain?"
"So they say. Never had to come to that, myself."
"Well, I was stuck right off. For how did I know how many days I was
going to stay on the island? The books on shipwrecks don't say
anything about that. I didn't know whether to divide the chocolate into
five pieces or ten,--they'd have been pretty small, if I'd had to have
made it last for ten days. Do you think it would have kept me alive