“Send him an anonymous letter,” suggested Jack. “Tell him the money is buried at a point about ten miles from here, and he’ll go there and dig. That will leave us free.”
“Yes, a hot chance we’d have of sending a letter up to him in this wilderness,” laughed Tom. “You might as well say a telegram. The only way to deliver a letter would be to leave it yourself, at the mill.”
“And that’s as risky as the way we are going,” said Dick.
It was the morning after the night on which Tom’s plan had been adopted, and the four chums were in the motorboat, journeying along the lake to the river on which the ruined mill was located. They had their lunch with them, intending to remain all day, if things were favorable, and Tom had the plan carefully put away in his pocket.
“I wonder if we’ll meet Skeel, and our two schoolmates?” asked Tom, as he turned on a little more gas to increase the speed of the engine.
“Not very likely,” was Jack’s opinion. “I shouldn’t be surprised but what they and the professor have taken up their quarters in, or near, the mill, to be right on the job.”
“Maybe so,” assented his roommate. “I wonder just where our old professor made his camp, anyhow? We might try to locate it, when we have nothing else to do.”
“It would be like hunting for a needle in a haystack to look for it in these woods,” said Tom. “That is, unless we had some better directions than just Crystal Lake.”
“If we could get the boat on that lake, we could sail around it,” suggested Bert. “If he’s camping near a lake he’s probably somewhere near the shore, and we could easily see his tent.”