His first
impulse was to jump upon the sleeper and fight him with an unfair
advantage, but he was not yet free from the restraining influence of
Sam's eye and voice so recently brought to bear upon him.

No, he dared not attack Sam even with so great an advantage. He must
injure him secretly as he had determined to do.

Creeping along upon all-fours, he felt about for Sam's boots, and
finding them at last, was just about to move away with them when Sam
turned over.

Jake sank down into the sand and listened, his heart beating and the
sweat standing in great drops on his forehead. Sam did not move again,
however, but seemed still to sleep. After waiting a long time Jake
crept away noiselessly, as he had come.

Slipping down over the low sand bank he stood by the river's edge with
the boots in his hand.

"Now," he muttered to himself, "I guess I'll be even with 'Captain
Sam.' By the time he marches a day or two barefoot with that game foot
o' his'n, I guess he'll begin to wish he hadn't been quite so sassy."

Filling the boots with sand he swung them back and forth, meaning to
toss them as far out into the river as he could. Just as he was about
quitting his hold of them, a terrifying thought seized him. The
sand-filled boots would make a good deal of noise in striking the
water, and Sam on the bank above would be sure to hear. Jake was ready
enough to injure Sam, but he was not by any means ready to encounter
that particularly cool and determined youth, while engaged in the act
of doing him a surreptitious injury. He must go higher up the stream
before putting his purpose into execution.

The bank at this point was crowned with a great pile of drift wood,
the accumulation of many floods, which had been caught and held in its
place by two great trees from the roots of which the water had
gradually washed the sand away until the trees themselves stood up
upon great root legs, fifteen feet long. The trees and the drift pile
were the same in which Sam Hardwicke had hidden his little party a
year before, when the fortunes of Indian war had thrown him, with Tom
and his sister, and the black boy Joe, upon their own resources in the
Indian haunted forest. The story is told in a former volume of this
series.[1] Sam's resting place just now was within a few feet of
the great tree roots, but Sam was not sleeping there, as Jake Elliott
supposed. He had been wide enough awake, ever since Jake first
startled him out of sleep