The Babe's weight, slight as it was, on the outer end, together with his occasional ecstatic, though silent, hoppings up and down, had little by little sufficed to slip the haphazard mooring.

This the Babe was far too absorbed to notice.
All at once, having just slipped a nice half-pounder onto the forked stick which served him instead of a fishing basket, he noticed that the wooded point which had been shutting off his view on the right seemed to have politely drawn back.

His heart jumped into his throat.

He turned--and there were twenty yards or so of clear water between the raft and the shore.

The raft was gently but none too slowly gliding out toward the tumbling whitecaps.
Always methodical, the Babe laid his rod and his string of fish carefully down on the logs, and then stood for a second or two quite rigid.