"Hi, there! You'll get pocketed in this little creek, you fellows--hung up aground here--if you don't look out! Can't you see that the water is leaving you?" cried a harsh voice from the bold marsh-bank which overhung the creek to the right of them, so suddenly that the three jumped. Looking up, they saw the unkempt figure of a young man, short of stature and showing a hungry leanness about the neck and face. This sudden apparition which had approached noiselessly over the soft marshes, was plainly outlined against the surrounding wildness of salt-marsh and tideway. Had the little dog-fox which prowled among the moonlit dunes been near, he might have recognized in the shabby figure his brother-prowler of the night before. Recognition was springing from another source. Starrie Chase caught his breath with such a wild gasp that he rocked the Pill as if a gust had struck it. Something about that stocky figure and in the expression of the face, half wistful, half savage, reminded him overwhelmingly of an old woman whom he had seen issuing, lantern in hand, from her paintless home, and who had raised her trembling arm to her breast at sight of him, Leon. "Forevermore! it's _Dave Baldwin_," he ejaculated in a whisper audible only to Nixon. "That's who it is--Nix!" "Don't you see that the tide is leaving you?" snapped the stranger again. "There won't be a teaspoonful of water in this creek presently." He was looking down at the Pill and its occupants, with a gleam in his eyes fugitive and phosphorescent as a marsh-light, which revealed a new expression upon his mud-smeared face, one of passionate envy--envy of the boy scouts healthily rejoicing over their captive pup-seal. "Tide leaving us! S-so it is!" Nixon seized an oar as if awakening from a dream. "Thank you for warning us! We don't want to be hung up in the pocket of this little creek--until it rises again!" "Then pull for all you're worth! Your boat--she's a funny one," broke off the stranger with the ghost of a boyish twinkle in his eye; "she looks as if she was made from a flat-bottomed dory that had been cut in two!" "So she was, I guess!" Leon too found his voice suddenly. "Well! luckily for you, she doesn't draw much water; you may scrape by an' get out into the open channel while there's tide enough left to float her!" And with an inarticulate grunt that might have been construed into some sort of farewell, the stranger disappeared over the marshes abruptly as he had come. Their own plight now engrossed the boys. It was clear that if they did not want to be pocketed in this out-of-the-way creek with their amphibious prize, grounded in the sand for the next five or six hours, without a hope of getting back to their camp on the dunes until the tide should rise again, they certainly must row for all they were worth!