I nearly fainted. Trapped on a wreck with a gang like that! Now we had to find their boat for ourselves. We crept along the side of the wreck, shaking with fear. It seemed to take a week. At last, near a door, there was the boat! I was just going to jump in when the door opened. Packard put his head out, only two feet from me, and I thought I was gone. But he threw a bag into the boat and got in. Then Bill came out and got in too.
“All ready, push off!” said Packard.
“Wait,” said Bill. “Did you take Turner’s money?”
“No. Didn’t you?”
“No. So he still has his share.”
“Well, come on. There’s no use taking the things and leaving the money.”
They got out and went back inside. In half a second I was in the boat, and Jim came falling in after me. I cut the rope with my knife, and away we went!
We didn’t touch an oar, and we didn’t speak or even breathe. In a few seconds we were a hundred yards below the wreck, and the night swallowed it up. We were safe. A little later we saw a lantern at the door of the wreck, and we knew the robbers had found out their boat was gone. Now they were in as much trouble as Jim Turner.
Jim took the oars, and we went after our raft. Now for the first time I began to worry about the men. How awful it was, even for murderers, to be in a trap like that! Maybe I would be a murderer myself some day, and then how would I like it?
“At the first light we see,” I told Jim, “I’ll go ashore and tell some story, and get somebody to go and save that gang. Then they can be hanged later, when their time comes.”
But the storm started again, worse than before. After a long time the rain stopped, and in a flash of lightning we saw something black floating ahead. It was the raft, and we were very glad to get on it again. We threw all the things the gang had stolen onto the raft.
Then we saw a light on the shore. I told Jim to float on and show a light when he was about two miles down, and I rowed toward the light. It came from a ferryboat. I found the watchman asleep, with his head between his knees. I shook his shoulder and began to cry.
“Hello, what’s wrong?” he said. “Don’t cry. What’s the trouble?”
“Pap, and Mom, and my sister, and—” I couldn’t go on.
When I could talk again, I told him my family was on the wreck, and Miss Hooker too, and they would all drown. Her uncle was Jim Hornback, the richest man around, I said, and he would pay for everything. When the watchman heard that, he said he would go right away. He sent me to Mr. Hornback’s house with the news and ran to wake up his engineer.
But I went back to my boat and hid near the shore, because I wanted to see the ferry start. I felt pretty good about all the trouble I was taking for that gang, because not many people would do it. I wished the widow knew about it. She would be proud of me, because bad men are the kind the widow and good people care about most.
Soon the wreck came sliding down the river in the dark. A cold shiver went through me. I rowed out to it. It was very low in the water, and I could see there was not much chance that anybody was alive in it. I rowed all around it and called, but nobody answered. I felt a little sad about the gang, but not much. If they could stand it, I could.
Then the ferryboat came. It went around the wreck for a while, and then it gave up and went back to the shore.
It seemed a very long time before I saw Jim’s light. By the time I reached the raft, the sky was getting gray. So we hid the raft by an island, sank the boat, lay down and slept like the dead.