I took a good gap and a stretch, and was just going to unhitch and start when I heard a sound away over the water.  I listened.  Pretty soon I made it out.  It was that dull kind of a regular sound that comes from oars working in rowlocks when it's a still night.  I peeped out through the willow branches, and there it was—a skiff, away across the water.  I couldn't tell how many was in it.  It kept a-coming, and when it was abreast of me I see there warn't but one man in it.  Think's I, maybe it's pap, though I warn't expecting him.  He dropped below me with the current, and by and by he came a-swinging up shore in the easy water, and he went by so close I could a reached out the gun and touched him.  Well, it _was_ pap, sure enough—and sober, too, by the way he laid his oars.

I didn't lose no time.  The next minute I was a-spinning down stream soft but quick in the shade of the bank.  I made two mile and a half, and then struck out a quarter of a mile or more towards the middle of the river, because pretty soon I would be passing the ferry landing, and people might see me and hail me.  I got out amongst the driftwood, and then laid down in the bottom of the canoe and let her float.

 I laid there, and had a good rest and a smoke out of my pipe, looking away into the sky; not a cloud in it.  The sky looks ever so deep when you lay down on your back in the moonshine; I never knowed it before.  And how far a body can hear on the water such nights!  I heard people talking at the ferry landing. I heard what they said, too—every word of it.  One man said it was getting towards the long days and the short nights now.  T'other one said _this_ warn't one of the short ones, he reckoned—and then they laughed, and he said it over again, and they laughed again; then they waked up another fellow and told him, and laughed, but he didn't laugh; he ripped out something brisk, and said let him alone.  The first fellow said he 'lowed to tell it to his old woman—she would think it was pretty good; but he said that warn't nothing to some things he had said in his time. I heard one man say it was nearly three o'clock, and he hoped daylight wouldn't wait more than about a week longer.  After that the talk got further and further away, and I couldn't make out the words any more; but I could hear the mumble, and now and then a laugh, too, but it seemed a long ways off.

I was away below the ferry now.  I rose up, and there was Jackson's Island, about two mile and a half down stream, heavy timbered and standing up out of the middle of the river, big and dark and solid, like a steamboat without any lights.  There warn't any signs of the bar at the head—it was all under water now.

It didn't take me long to get there.  I shot past the head at a ripping rate, the current was so swift, and then I got into the dead water and landed on the side towards the Illinois shore.  I run the canoe into a deep dent in the bank that I knowed about; I had to part the willow branches to get in; and when I made fast nobody could a seen the canoe from the outside.