“I’m glad you thought it worth while to fetch your rifle along with you, Oscar, because if anything should happen, and you did run across some hard characters, they’d find you armed.”
“Oh! give Ballyhoo credit for thinking about the gun,” replied Oscar; “but if we mean to get back before sunset, Ballyhoo, we’d better be starting.”
They left Jack sitting there near the boat, and “fiddling” with his camera, as Ballyhoo always called it when the artist chose to manipulate certain screws, or make any sort of changes to suit his whim.
“Why, this isn’t half bad, after all, Oscar!” the Jones boy declared after they had been moving along for some little time, keeping their faces in the one set direction, which was easily done, since they had the sun to guide them.
“A regular picnic, I should call it,” the leader said over his shoulder.
Some time afterwards Oscar reached the conclusion that they must be drawing near the opposite side of the Key, having gone directly across it from end to end. The breeze was rustling the serrated leaves of the palmettoes, and waving the long fronds of the cocoanut trees, showing that there was quite a little air stirring at this end of the island, even while it seemed calm where they were working.
Suddenly Oscar stopped dead in his tracks.
“Did you hear anything then, Ballyhoo?” he asked.
“I certainly did,” came the reply, “and it sounded mighty like an oar hitting the side of a boat, in the bargain.”
“Just what I thought,” continued the other. “Come, let’s creep forward and take a look out. I expect we must be close to the beach that I’ve figured lies at this end of the Key, protected by a reef or two further off.”