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Updated: June 17, 2025
In its natural beauties and advantages Fallen Leaf Lodge claims and with strong justification one of the very best of locations. Fallen Leaf Lake is large enough to give scope to all the motor-boats, row-boats, canoes and launches that are likely to be brought to it for the next hundred years, and ten thousand fishermen could successfully angle upon its bosom or along its shores.
Four enlisted men had followed us with a wagon, in which were our tents, bedding, and boxes of provisions, and these men busied themselves at once by putting up the little tents and making preparations for dinner, and we were anxious to get enough fish for their dinner as well as our own. At a little landing we found two row-boats, and getting in these we were soon out on the lake.
Fires of charcoal, indeed, being lighted in the sterns of the boats, were permitted to burn as long as daylight lasted; but as soon as it grew dark, they were of necessity extinguished, lest the flame should be seen by row-boats from the shore, and an alarm be thus communicated.
When the raft came into view around a point, it was seen to be too big for the boats to handle unaided, and two gunboats slipped their cables, and started for the thing of terror. From every side the row-boats dashed at the raft. Some grappled it, and the sailors tugged lustily at their oars, seeking to drag the mass of flames toward the shore.
And as he sat pondering that point, from the bushes a naked man emerged. He was not entirely undraped. For around his nakedness he had drawn a canvas awning. Fred recognized it as having been torn from one of the row-boats in the lake. But, except for that, the man was naked to his heels. He was a young man of Fred's own age.
On the other hand, while Dick and Tom could row well, they had pulled together but twice since coming to Brill. "You've got your work cut out for you!" shouted Songbird. "But never mind. Go in and win!" For the first quarter of a mile the two row-boats kept close together. Occasionally one would forge ahead a few inches, but the other would speedily overtake it.
Aside from the pyrotechnics, the chief occupations of this place are boating and fishing. Boats abound row-boats, sail-boats, and steam-launches for excursion parties. The river consequently presents an animated appearance in the season, and the prettiest effects are produced by the white sails dipping about among the green islands.
At sundown that night, Commander Porter reviewed his little squadron of row-boats as they lay drawn up in line along the low marshy shores of the mighty river. The sun sank a glowing red ball beneath the line at which the blue waters of the gulf and the blue arch of heaven seemed to meet. The long southern twilight gradually deepened into a black, moonless night.
But it was the high bank that, after a while, was responsible for Gadabout's ceasing to take any course at all. We came about a bend and saw, just ahead, a little cove. There were trees crowding close, rich pines and cedars and bright-beaded holly. One tree leaned far out over the water, and beneath it two row-boats were drawn up to the bank.
But they broke out of the fog bank the next morning to see dead ahead two boats, each pulled by four pair of oars, wearily approaching the course of the coastwise steamships. "I smell a U-boat about!" declared Ensign MacMasters, when he had directed the steamer's course to be changed to run down to the row-boats. He was right.
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