So we settled down to wait for the tide to go down and change.

After a while we began to see the flats all around us and there wasn't any water near us at all--only the water in the channel away over near the west shore.
We were high and dry and there wasn't any way for a fellow to get away from where we were, because he couldn't swim and he'd only sink in the mud, if he tried to walk it.
Well, while we were sitting around trying to figure out how long it would be before the water would go down and then come up enough to carry us off, Doc Carson said, "Listen!" and we heard the chug of a motor boat quite a long way off.
It was getting dark good and fast now, and there was a pretty wide stretch of flats between us and the channel.

Pretty soon we could hear voices--all thin, sort of, as if they came from a long way off.

That's the way it is on the water.
"She's coming down Dutch Creek," one of the fellows said.

After a while another fellow said he thought it was Jake Holden.