“I wish we hadn’t left our overcoats behind,” I reflected. “Let’s see. Four hours till daylight. We’ll be damnably cold. Let’s go fetch ’em. Heaps of time. Nothing else to do.” Back on the river bank I tied my handkerchief to a branch, knee-high above the ground. After a careful look round, to impress the contours of the landscape on my mind, we started back. I had not the slightest misgivings about our ability to find our knapsacks and to disappear again into our hiding-place. The hollow where we had left them? Gracious me! I could walk there blindfolded. I could draw its shape now. My cock-sureness was not at all damped by Kent’s dismal forebodings, on which he started as we approached the spot. We found the boat, but not our luggage; we searched for it more than half an hour, quite recklessly at the last. There were thousands of apparently identical hollows. They had multiplied exceedingly during our absence. I thought I entered them all. But our luggage was lost, and stayed lost. “No use. We’ve got to go.” I fell in with the urging of the others at last. At about 3:30 we stretched ourselves on the dry leaves among the oak saplings and fell asleep. CHAPTER XXV THE LAST LAP Half an hour later we were awake again, shivering and with chattering teeth. The wind was rising and rustling in the canopy of leaves over our heads. It was dark and bitterly cold. “I’m going to do something,” I announced. “We may have rain. I’ll build a shelter.” The oak saplings offered an ideal material for an arbor, although the clasp-knife did not bite readily through their tough fibers. Jointly we interlaced the crowns of six or seven stout saplings, growing in a circle, and twisted long branches in and out of the stems. We made a small but dense roof. The floor we covered with small twigs and leaves to the depth of two or three inches. The exertion made the blood course through our veins again. Before we had finished, it was day. The wind had increased to a gale, which shrieked and roared and rustled among the foliage, sending occasional eddies even into our hiding-place. It kept the rain off, which threatened now and again during the forenoon. There were no mosquitoes. I do not think there ever are any among oaks. Several excursions to the river bank, in couples or singly, one of us always remaining in the arbor, warmed us a little when we had got chilled to the bone. The river path, and the belt of scattered bushes, remained deserted all day. But we observed a considerable amount of river traffic. Long strings of barges, mostly empty, were being towed upstream by powerful tugs. Tynsdale scouted toward the west, away from the river, and reported a farm some distance from our hiding-place in that direction, and the existence of a pond and a belt of marsh-land behind the thicket.