The plaintive crying of gulls waked Hugh just as the sun was coming up from the water, a great red ball in the morning mist. “I don’t like this place,” he said as he sat up. “We can be seen plainly from the lake.”
“Yes,” Blaise agreed, “but we can see far across the lake. If a boat comes, we shall see it while it is yet a long way off. I think we need not fear anything from that direction. No, the only way an enemy can draw near unseen is from the land, from the woods farther back there.”
“The water is absolutely still,” Hugh went on. “There isn’t a capful of wind to fill our sail, and we can’t paddle this loaded boat clear across to the mainland. We must find a better place than this, though, to wait for a breeze. I am going to look around a bit.”
The lads soon found that they were near the end of a point, a worn, wave-eaten, rock point, bare except for a few scraggly bushes, clumps of dwarfed white cedar and such mosses and lichens as could cling to the surface. Farther back were woods, mostly evergreen. The two felt that they must find a spot where they could wait for a wind without being visible from the woods. Yet they wanted to remain where they could watch the weather and get away at the first opportunity. At the very tip of the point, the slate-gray rocks were abrupt, slightly overhanging indeed, but in one spot there lay exposed at the base a few feet of low, shelving, wave-smoothed shore, which must be under water in rough weather. On this calm day the lower rock shore was dry. There, in the shelter of the overhanging masses, the boys would be entirely concealed from the land side. A little farther along on the end of the point, rose an abrupt, rounded tower of rock. Between the rock tower and the place they had selected for themselves was a narrow inlet where the bateau would be fairly well hidden. They shoved the boat out from between the boulders, where it had lain safe while they slept, and paddled around to the little inlet. On the wave-smoothed, low rock shore, they kindled a tiny fire of dry sticks gathered at the edge of the woods, and hung the kettle from a pole slanted over the flames from a cranny in the steep rock at the rear.
The wind did not come up as the sun rose higher, as the lads had hoped it would. The delay was trying, especially to the impetuous Hugh. They had found the cache, secured the furs and the packet, and had got safely away with them, only to be stuck here on the end of this point for hours of idle waiting. Yet even Hugh did not want to start across the lake under the present conditions. Paddling the bateau had been laborious enough when it was empty, but now, laden almost to the water-line, the boat was far worse to handle. Propelling it was not merely hard work, but progress would be so slow that the journey across to the mainland would be a long one, with always the chance that the wind, when it did come, might blow from the wrong quarter. The bateau would not sail against the wind. To attempt to paddle it against wind and waves would invite disaster. Sailing the clumsy craft, heavy laden as it was, across the open water with a fair wind would be quite perilous enough. There was nothing to do but wait, and this seemed as good a place in which to wait as any they were likely to find.
XVIII
THE FLEEING CANOE
As the morning advanced, the sun grew hot, beating down on the water and radiating heat from the rocks. Scarcely a ripple wrinkled the blue surface of the lake, and the distance was hazy and shimmering. An island with steep, straight sides, four or five miles northeast of the point, was plainly visible, but Thunder Cape to the west was so dim it could barely be discerned. The day was much like the one on which the lads had come across from the mainland.
Hugh grew more and more restless. Several times he climbed the only climbable place on the overhanging rock and peeped between the branches of a dwarfed cedar bush. He could see across to the edge of the woods, but he discovered nothing to either interest or alarm him. By the time the sun had passed the zenith, he could stand inaction no longer. He was not merely restless. He had become vaguely uneasy. The boat was hidden from his view by the rocks between. In such a lonely place he would have had no fear for the furs, had it not been for the shot and the call he and Blaise had heard.
“Someone might slip out of the woods and down to the boat without our catching a glimpse of him,” Hugh remarked at last. “I’m going over there to see if everything is all right.”
To reach the boat, he was obliged to climb to his peeping place and pull himself up the rest of the way, or else go around and across the top of the steep rocks. He chose the latter route. The boat and furs he found unharmed. The only trespasser was a gull that had alighted on one of the bales and was trying with its strong, sharp beak to pick a hole in the wrapping. He frightened the bird away, then stopped to drink from his cupped palm.