Slowly the heavy boat crept through the water.  Paul, at the tiller, steered with judgment and craft, and his was no light task.  Now and then low boughs were lapped in the water and bushes submerged to their tops grew in the way.  To become tangled in them might be fatal and to scrape against them would be a signal to their enemies, but Paul steered clear every time.

They had gone perhaps fifty yards when Henry gave a signal to stop and Jim and Tom rested on their oars.  Then they heard a burst of firing behind them, and a smile of saturnine triumph spread slowly but completely over the face of Shif’less Sol.

“They’re shootin’ at the place whar we wuz, an’ whar we ain’t now,” he whispered to Henry.

“Yes,” Henry whispered back, “they haven’t found out yet that we’ve left, but they are likely to do it pretty soon.  I hope now that this fog will hang on just as thick as it can.  Start up again, boys.”

“‘Twould be funny,” whispered Sol, “ef the savages should find us an’ chase us right into the bosoms o’ the Spaniards.”

“Yes,” replied Henry, “and for that reason I think we’d better bend around a circle and then go up stream.  I’ll tell Paul to steer that way.”

They went on again, creeping through the white darkness; fifty yards or so at a time, and then a pause to listen.  Henry judged that they were about a half mile from their original anchorage, when the solemn note of an owl arose, to be answered by a similar note from another point.

“They’ve discovered our departure,” he whispered, “and they’re telling it to each other.  I imagine that their war canoes will now come in a kind of half circle toward the center of the river.  They’ll guess that we won’t retreat toward the land, because then we might be hemmed in.”

“No doubt of it,” replied Sol, “and I think we’d better pull off toward the north now.  Mebbe we kin give ’em the slip.”

Henry gave the word and Paul steered the boat in the chosen course.  The forest grew thinner, showing that they were approaching the true stream, but the fog held fast.  After a hundred yards or so they stopped again, and then they distinctly heard the sound of paddles to their right.  It was not a great splash, but they knew it well.  Paul, at the tiller, fancied that he could see the faces of the savages bending over their paddles.  They were eager, he knew, for their prey, and either chance or instinct had brought them through the white pall in the right course.

The uncertainty, the fog, and the great mysterious river weighed upon Paul.  He wished, for a moment, that the vapors might lift, and then they could fight their enemies face to face.  He glanced at his own comrades and they had taken on an unearthly look.  Their forms became gigantic and unreal in the white darkness.  As Henry leaned forward to listen better his figure was distorted like that of a misshapen giant.

“Steer straight toward the north, Paul,” he whispered.  “We must shake them off somehow or other.”