CHAPTER XX.
SOLVING A MYSTERY.
“What’s that you say?” burst out Davy, looking as startled as though, to use the words of Giraffe, he “had seen his great grandfather’s spook!”
“Wandering George! Out here on our island, too!” gasped Bumpus, just as though they had a permanent right to the strip of land in the middle of the river—“our” island he called it.
Of course all of them turned toward Thad, as usual, expecting him to give the answer to the question that puzzled them. The patrol leader laughed as he pointed down once more to that tell-tale track.
“No going behind the returns, is there, boys?” he said. “Every one of you knows that footprint by heart, because we took the pains to study it. And the man whose old battered shoe is being held on with a rag we know is Wandering George. He is responsible for taking our provisions. Right now you can imagine how much he’s enjoying that cheese and crackers we expected to last us out to-day.”
Giraffe groaned.
“And that fine strip of bacon we lifted at the time we left the shanty-boat!” added Step Hen, with a dismal look toward Bob White, who raised his eyes as if in horror at the idea of such desecration.
“It’s easy to understand that the hobo’s on the island, but how in the wide world could he get here without wings? That’s what I want to know,” Allan observed; which at least went to show that so far no one had been able to figure it out, for if anybody could, surely the Maine boy, who had followed many a difficult trail in his time, ought to be able to.
“Mebbe he crossed over to the island when the water was low?” suggested Step Hen, but the idea was instantly scorned by Giraffe.
“You forget that the river’s been on the boom for some little while,” he said loftily; “and we happen to know that George wasn’t far ahead of us just yesterday. Now, you’re wondering if I’ve got a theory of my own, and I’ll tell you what I think. Somehow or other George must have been in a boat, and came that way. How do we know but what he was trying to cross over, and the current swept him down stream? Then, again, he might have been in some house or barn that was carried away by the flood, and managed to get ashore here.”