Sometime past the middle of the afternoon they were running eastward on the outer edge of a great ox-bow bend where the strong current bit deep into the Mississippi side. Floating swiftly as they were, with the bank only sixty or seventy yards away, Abe was rowing, and Allen was at the steering-sweep watching for possible snags. Suddenly Abe pointed at the top of the bluff, high above them and a little distance upstream. “Look a’ thar!” he exclaimed. “They’re out o’ sight now, but you’ll see ’em in a jiffy past that clump o’ trees.” Tad watched with all his eyes, and even Allen turned to look where the big fellow was pointing. But the seconds passed and nothing happened. “Ye’d ought to have a sunshade,” the steersman remarked solicitously. “This heat’s makin’ ye see things.” Abe frowned in puzzlement. “It beats me,” he said. “I’d ha’ sworn I saw three men on horseback, gallopin’ along that road on the bluff. What the ’Nation do ye s’pose become of ’em?” “Probably thought that long arm o’ your’n was a gun aimed at ’em,” Allen suggested. But Tad was less inclined to take the incident as a joke. He approved Abe’s judgment that evening when the lanky oarsman pulled over toward the western shore. “I sort o’ feel the need of a change o’ climate,” was Abe’s comment. “Reckon we’ll find the night air a bit healthier over here in Louisiana.” Weary as he was, Tad fell asleep ten minutes after supper was over and never opened his eyes again until the smoke from the breakfast fire blew into them next morning. But he knew without being told that his two friends had stood guard by turns, all night. “With a good start this mornin’,” said Abe, cocking an eye at the rising sun, “we’d ought to be ’most a hundred mile from Natchez by nightfall. I reckon we made thirty-five yesterday. Suits me to git as far away from that ’ar town as we kin--an’ as fast.” The rest of the crew being in complete agreement with this idea, they finished breakfast in a hurry and were soon spinning downstream again. By noon they had put another thirty miles between them and the scene of Tad’s capture, and all of them began to breathe easier. But in his desire to add to the _Katy Roby’s_ speed, Abe pulled a trifle too hard on one of the forward sweeps, and the deeply-worn handle broke with a snap. There was nothing to do but land and make a new one. Abe took the stern oar and swung over to the Louisiana bank. After they had tied up it took the two flatboatmen the best part of an hour to find the kind of tree they liked in this unfamiliar, half-tropical forest. When at last they had chosen a good-sized sapling, Abe whetted his ax and hewed swiftly away, first shaping a blade at the butt of the log, then cutting a long, rough handle out of the straight-grained center. Finally, with his clasp knife, he smoothed up the inequalities along the shaft, and before sunset they had a new oar as good as the old one.