Some last reserve of pluck kept his arms and legs going despite the achy weariness that was in them. He thought he saw a blacker mass rising in the blackness ahead, but it seemed to draw no nearer, and he lost hope. Then his toe struck something soft that frightened him. He lashed out desperately to get away from it and struck it again. It was mud. He could stand up, half out of water, and wade. The looming bulk ahead of him must be trees. In another minute or two he was crawling up the bank, so nearly exhausted that he seemed hardly able to move, yet filled with an indescribable sense of happiness at being alive. Another attack of shivers made him realize that he must try to get warm. Rising, he half stumbled, half ran along a sort of path that followed the top of the bank. And a moment later, to his joy, he saw a small cabin set in a clearing ahead of him. Hurrying forward, he approached the front of the shack and was about to rouse its inmates by knocking on the door, when two huge dogs came running around the corner and rushed at him. They growled and snapped so viciously at his bare legs that Tad made a hasty retreat, beating them off with the cord which he had removed from his ankle and was still carrying. “Hello, the house!” he cried. But the people inside either could not or would not hear him, and after a moment of hesitation a renewed attack by the dogs caused him to keep on his way westward along the bank. The damp twigs and briars slapped and scratched his naked legs, but he was past paying any attention to such trifles. If only he could find a sheltered corner of some sort where he could curl up and rest without perishing of cold! The path opened after a while on another clearing, bigger than the first, and he made out the shapes of half a dozen scattered houses off to the right, away from the river. There was something depressing in their silent blackness, and after his experience at the last place, he had little heart to approach them. Instead he followed a deeply rutted road that led forward to the bank of what seemed to be a good-sized creek flowing into the Ohio. Tad groped his way to the door of a log shanty which stood by the water--a store-house of some kind, he thought. But here again he was disappointed, for a heavy padlock secured the latch. As he stood there, shivering and desperate, his eye fell on a long, dark bulk beside the landing-stage. It was a boat--a clumsy broadhorn of the kind he had seen drifting down the river.