"But let's remember," warned Thad, "that we don't want to let ourselves be drawn into a battle with these poachers, unless it's the last resort. They're ignorant men, and just now they must feel pretty desperate, thinking that we're going to break up a profitable game they've been playing for a long time, carrying their fish to some American market against the laws of Canada, and perhaps smuggling their cargo in, if there's any duty on fish, which I don't know about."
"If only you could get a bare chance to talk with one of the lot, Thad," Allan spoke up, "I'm pretty sure you'd be able to let them know the truth; and in that way we'd perhaps make friends of them. They might take our solemn promise that we never would give them away, and land us somewhere ashore, so we could make our way to either Duluth, or some other place to the north here."
"I'm hoping to get just such an opening, if we can hold the fort till morning; and they haven't skipped out by then," Thad told him; which proved that he had planned far ahead of anything that had as yet been proposed.
"And meanwhile try to be thinking up any French words you ever heard," suggested Bumpus, artfully. "Who knows what use the same'd be to you in a tight hole. How'd parley vous Francais sound, now? I've heard our dancing-master in Cranford use that more'n a few times, though I own up I don't know from Adam what she means. But it might make a fellow come to a standstill if he was agoing to run you through, and you suddenly shot it at him."
"Thank you, Bumpus, I'll remember that, though I think it means 'do you speak French?' And what if he took me up, and became excited because I couldn't understand anything he said, you see it wouldn't help much," the scout-master told him.
"But say, what are we meaning to do about standing guard; because I reckon now we've got to watch out, and not let them fellows gobble us up while we're sleeping like the babes in the wood?" Step Hen asked.
"Oh! that can be fixed easy enough, if we all have to stay awake through the whole night. Wouldn't that be the best plan, Thad?"
It was Bumpus who put this important question, but none of them were deceived in the least by this apparent warlike aspect on the part of the fat scout.
Bumpus could play a clever game when he became fully aroused; but if Thad guessed what his true reason might be for asking such a question, he did not choose to betray the fact, knowing that it would cause the fat scout more or less confusion.
"Yes, it might be as well for all of us to try and stay awake!" he declared. "As you seem to have settled it that the gun falls to my share, why, I'll make up my mind not to close an eye the whole livelong night; and if the rest choose to sit up with me and help watch, the more the merrier."