"I should think" grinned the boatman in an attempt to be facetious, "that the best place to carry them things is inside."
"Ye're right and ye can make up yer mind that's where they will find a lodging place by and by. I'm riddy."
The old man bent to his oars and headed across the Sheepscot, leaving the islet of Whittom on the south, and aiming for a point due west of Isle of Springs. It was, as he had declared, a long and hard row, but those muscles had been toughened by years of toil and seemed tireless. The swaying was slow but as steady as clockwork, and Mike sitting in the stern admired the rower, who paused only once and then for but a moment in which to wrench off with his yellow teeth a chew of tobacco from the plug which he carried in his pocket.
The shore in front was covered with a vigorous growth of fir, which, as is so general in Maine, found root to the very water's edge. The ground sloped upward, but the height was moderate. Mike had been half inclined to direct the boatman to row directly into the little bay. This would be the quickest way to decide whether the Deerfoot was there, but he deemed it wiser to make a stealthy approach. He wished to descend upon the thieves without any notice. Besides, if they learned his purpose, they were likely, as he well knew, to elude him, as they could readily do.
Standing on the shore, he turned to the old man:
"As I obsarved, I'm not sure whether I'll be coming this way agin. Would ye mind waiting here for three or four days till the quistion is settled?"
His face was so serious that the other thought he was in earnest. Mike hastened to explain:
"Tarry until ye obsarve a motor launch comin' out of the cove; whin ye see the same, ye may go home; all ye have to mind is to wait and obsarve for mesilf."
The boatman nodded and Mike departed. He moved along the inlet, which was a great deal broader and deeper than the one visited by Alvin and Chester later on the same day. He had to thread his way for two or three hundred yards through the woods where there was no path, before turning the bend which until then hid the boat from sight. He was still advancing, all the time in sight of the sweep of water, when he stopped with the sudden exclamation:
"Woorah, now! but doesn't that beat all creation!"