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"I can't hear them," whispered Tom, after a moment's listening. "They've made for shore down the beach. They can't find us in the dark. I've got Fleetwing tied to a fence in the meadow yonder. Come." It was the work of a moment to stow the canoe, lock the boathouse, run across the sands, and mount Nancy in front of him on the back of his trusty hunter.
"Well," I observed, my eye catching a ladder beside the garage, "there's a ladder. We can do no more than try." He walked over to the automobile, took a little package out, slipped it into his pocket, and a few minutes later we had set the ladder up against the side of the boathouse farthest away from the house.
"Don't say anything about the boathouse," whispered Ham Spink to Kiddy Leech, to which the tramp replied with a knowing wink of his bleery eye. "Have you been up to the Dodge camp?" questioned Carl Dudder. "Yes, and those chaps treated me shamefully," answered Kiddy Leech. "I never touched a thing they had, yet they accused me of trying to steal some of their traps." "Just like 'em," said Ham.
I promised, curtly, to be careful, and, after saying good morning to Mother, I went down to the boathouse and set to work on the engine. It was the only thing in the nature of work that I had to do, but, somehow or other, I did not feel like doing it any more than I had the day before.
We blundered in here on our way to the head of the river. If we can get directions we will be on our way at once." The girl looked from her aunt to Ramos and then to Payne, and her chin went up. "Come," she said, and led the way to the boathouse on the lake shore. "Oh, Willy Tiger!" As mild and stoical a Seminole Indian as ever belied his surname responded to her call.
"They shouldn't have left it there," Connie said; "that's no place for a canoe." I guess we were all kind of nervous and cranky like. Then I saw that there was a black figure sitting on the lowest step of the boathouse. I was just going to call "Who's there?" when Doc said, "Pull that canoe out of the way before we smash it in."
An old ramshackle house, which Tom thought might once have been a boathouse, stood near, the water lapping its underpinning. Close by it was a buoyed mooring float six or eight feet square, bobbing in the rushing water. One of the four air-tight barrels which supported it had caught in the mud and kept the buoyant, raft-like platform from being carried downstream in the rush of water.
"Ham Spink and his crowd are not on hand to molest our things, as they tried to do before." "Well, we gave 'em a warm reception when they did come to the boathouse," answered Snap with a grin, referring to an event related in detail in "The Young Hunters of the Lake."
And once, when a great dusky form of a sea-lion came crawling over the mound, and whimpering peeped into the boathouse, she even fled to his shoulder with both hands for a moment, and was there, light as a feather, till the creature had passed on. And his soul was full of peace, and a great tranquillity overcame it. He heard nothing of the wrack, knew nothing of the danger. Oh, mighty Love!
It was all arranged to a queen's taste nothing was left undone. Bracken was to meet us at his uncle's boathouse down there, and good heavens, there was a shot!" The sharp crack of a rifle broke upon the still, balmy air, as they say in the "yellow-backs," and the fugitives looked at each other with suddenly awakened dread. "The fools!" grated the man.
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