ar that urged him on. Then the woods
closed about him. His long legs, working tirelessly, carried him over
fallen logs and through tall tangled thickets, the voices behind him
growing more and more distant as he ran.

CHAPTER XII. THE FAMILY ON THE RAFT

That would unquestionably have been the end of Bob Yancy when he was
shot out into the muddy waters of the Elk River, had not Mr.
Richard Keppel Cavendish, variously known as Long-Legged Dick,
and Chills-and-Fever Cavendish, of Lincoln County, in the state of
Tennessee, some months previously and after unprecedented mental effort
on his part, decided that Lincoln County was no place for him. When
he had established this idea firmly in his own mind and in the mind of
Polly, his wife, he set about solving the problem of transportation.

Mr. Cavendish's paternal grandparent had drifted down the Holston and
Tennessee; and Mr. Cavendish's father, in his son's youth, had poled
up the Elk. Mr. Cavendish now determined to float down the Elk to its
juncture with the Tennessee, down the Tennessee to the Ohio, and if need
be, down the Ohio to the Mississippi, and keep drifting until he found
some spot exactly suited to his taste. Temperamentally, he was well
adapted to drifting. No conception of vicarious activity could have been
more congenial.

With this end in view he had toiled through late winter and early
spring, building himself a raft on which to transport his few belongings
and his numerous family; there were six little Cavendishes, and they
ranged in years from four to eleven; there was in addition the baby, who
was always enumerated separately. This particular infant Mr. Cavendish
said he wouldn't take a million dollars for. He usually added feelingly
that he wouldn't give a piece of chalk for another one.

June found him aboard his raft with all his earthly possessions bestowed
about him, awaiting the rains and freshets that were to waft him
effortless into a newer country where he should have a white man's
chance. At last the rains came, and he cast off from the bank at that
unsalubrious spot where his father had elected to build his cabin on a
strip of level bottom subject to periodic inundation. Wishing fully to
profit by the floods and reach the big water without delay, Cavendish
ran the raft twenty-four hours at a stretch, sleeping by day while Polly
managed the great sweep, only calling him when some dangerous bit of the
river was to be navigated. Th