"For my part," spoke up Step Hen, "they couldn't clear out any too soon to make me feel happy. I know what the breed is like, and believe me, boys, I don't care to make their acquaintance, not me."
"That's all mighty fine, Step Hen," remarked Giraffe, loftily, "but when you talk that way you don't look far enough ahead."
"Just explain that, will you, and tell me why I don't?" demanded the other, with some show of indignation.
"Well, suppose now they did jump the island, and give us the merry ha! ha! what difference would it make to us whether they upset out there on that stormy lake or not; wouldn't we lose all chance of being ferried across to the mainland, and so making our escape from this measly island?"
Step Hen apparently caught the force of this reasoning, for he subsided, with a sort of discontented grunt.
Davy, however, took up the reasoning at this point.
"But suppose now they wouldn't want to get out in such a hurry? What if they had a lot of valuable fish nets around somewhere that they hated to let go? Don't you reckon in that case they might take a notion to try and bag the lot of us, so's to hold us prisoners till they could decide what to do with the ones they took to be Government spies?"
Bumpus groaned as he listened to all this terrible talk. His mind was already on fire with anticipations of what the immediate future might bring forth. Still, on occasion Bumpus could show considerable valor; and several times in the past he had astonished his chums by certain feats which he had engineered.
"It's up to me to think up some way to get us out of this terrible pickle," he was telling himself, over and over again; but even if any one of his five comrades heard what he was saying they paid little attention to it; but the fat scout meant all he said, as the future proved.
"One thing sure," Giraffe went on to remark, presently, "they know where our little camp is, because Thad saw that spy watching what we was adoing here. And if so be they should take a notion to pay us a visit before morning, why, they wouldn't have any trouble finding us out."