It's no use then to waste time looking there any more.

He must have left here, either accidentally or on purpose.

He couldn't have slipped off the drift and drowned, because he can swim pretty well and would have swam out in a minute.

There is no other way in which he can have left here by accident, unless an Indian has killed him on the drift-pile somewhere, and if that were so I would have found his body.

He must have run away on purpose." But just as Tom reached this point in his thinking he remembered the earnestness with which poor Joe had begged him to bear witness in any and every event that he was not "a runaway nigger." And this reminded Tom of all the queer ways he had noticed in Joe of late.