forgot that the tide would be running down the
river instead of up. If we had only remembered that, three or four of
us could have gone ashore with a rope and tied her in the channel,
which ran along the near shore. Then all we would have had to do would
have been to sit around and wait for it to turn, so we could drift up
to Bridgeboro with it.

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 rig