CHAPTER V
A STRANGE CONVERSATION
For a long minute after the stranger had departed, Ned Blake stood staring after him, a puzzled frown wrinkling his forehead.
“Humph!” grunted Dick, who also was gazing after the hurrying figure. “He must have been in an awful rush, if he’d pay twenty-five dollars just to get here ahead of the express. What do you make of it, Ned?”
Dick had to repeat his question before Ned roused himself to reply; but now the conversation was interrupted by the plaintive voice of Tommy Beals, who had dragged himself from the end of the cross-plank and was stamping the blood back into his aching feet.
“Gosh, I’m about froze to death!” he wailed. “Froze and starved! What’s the program, Ned?”
Ned cast a quick look at the fast-gathering shadows, which already lay in a black smudge along the shore of the lake. “We’d better not try to get home tonight,” he decided. “I’ve no mind to chance jumping that crack after dark. There’s a hotel close by the station where we can get a good dinner and a bed. We’ve got the cash to pay for both.”
“Yeah, that’s the idea!” exclaimed Tommy fervently. “A steak smothered in onions and French fried spuds! What?”
“How about the boat?” asked Dick.
“We’ll furl the sails and push her in against the dock,” replied Ned. “We can unship the tiller and hide it so that nobody will be tempted to run off with her.”
This was quickly done and the boys turned their steps toward the Union Station, the lights of which gleamed a scant hundred yards ahead. The express had thundered into the station while they were taking care of the boat, and now, as they crossed the tracks, her rear lights were blinking in the distance as she picked her way through the switch-yards westward bound.