But just when we were floating out of the creek, we forgot all about what the tide would do to us, unless we were on the job and sure enough it caught us and sent us whirling around and away over on to the flats.

“Good night!” I said when I heard her scrape.

“We should have had sense enough to know the tide is stronger here than in the creek,” they all said.

“What’s the difference?” Dorry Benton said,

“We’re stuck on the flats, that’s all.  Now we don’t have to bother to tie her.  When the tide changes, we’ll float off and go on upstream all right.  We’re just as well off as if we were tied up in the channel.”

Well, I guess he was right except for what happened pretty soon.  So we settled down to wait for the tide to go down and change.  After a while we began to see the flats all around us and there wasn’t any water near us at all—­only the water in the channel away over near the west shore.  We were high and dry and there wasn’t any way for a fellow to get away from where we were, because he couldn’t swim and he’d only sink in the mud, if he tried to walk it.

Well, while we were sitting around trying to figure out how long it would be before the water would go down and then come up enough to carry us off, Doc Carson said, “Listen!” and we heard the chug of a motor boat quite a long way off.

It was getting dark good and fast now, and there was a pretty wide stretch of flats between us and the channel.  Pretty soon we could hear voices—­all thin, sort of, as if they came from a long way off.  That’s the way it is on the water.

“She’s coming down Dutch Creek,” one of the fellows said.  After a while another fellow said he thought it was Jake Holden.  Then another one said it wasn’t.

“Sure it is,” Connie Bennett said, “listen.”

Then as plain as day I could hear the words “Crab running,” and then in a minute something about “bad news.”  Pretty soon, through the steady chugging I could hear a voice say very plain, “I’m glad it doesn’t have to be me to tell her.”

We couldn’t make them out because it was getting too dark, but it was Jake Holden, the fisherman, all right.  Pretty soon the engine began chugging double, sort of, and I knew they were going around the corner into Bridgeboro River, because there’s a steep shore there, and it makes an echo.

I was a chump not to realize what they were talking about, but they had chugged around into Bridgeboro River and were heading upstream before it popped into my thick head.  And even then it was on account of something else they said, as the chugging grew fainter all the time.  It seemed as if I heard it while I was dreaming, as you might say.  I knew they were pretty far upstream by now, but the voice was awful clear, like voices always sound across the water, especially in the night.

“He was a nice little fellow,” that’s what I said, “but he had a right to keep out of that place.”