"Quite mysterious," said Peter teasingly.
"Something else happened that seemed a bit mysterious at the time, didn't it, old chap?" said Robin, paying off Jan's score. "What about the noise at midnight?"
"Why, I'd forgotten all about it. So there was!" Peter broke into his story, and the experience lost nothing in the telling: "Bang, bang! Thump, thump! Ting, ting! it went," quoth he, "right through my head."
His mother laughed. "The effect of the late supper, my dear; probably both mysteries come from the same cause. Well, I must go. Robin, remember you're in charge."
"All right, Mother, but everything's going spiffingly, really," her eldest son assured her.
The day was a busy one. First of all, the camp had to be cleared as the Captain commanded. Then came the making of the day's arrangements, and the procuring of supplies. Potatoes could be bought from a neighbouring farm; eggs also; butter and bread and tea from the village shop over the river. Jan was anxious to try her hand at a stew, and the meat for this had to be procured. Mrs. Brown's chores had to be put in hand too; old Brown was away early and the boys were anxious, as Scouts, to do as many good turns as they could for the kind old dame in return for her good services to them. Her wood was collected, and her kindling was chopped; her stores were brought in from the neighbouring shop; half-an-hour's work was put in on mending up the fence of her little garden. "And we'll have a go at earthing up your potatoes, Brownie, while we're on the Island," said Robin.
After dinner and a rest the making of the "regular" hut began; the bivouac was only to be used until better accommodation was ready. A solid piece of work the making of the "Pioneer Hut"—as the boys called it—promised to be. First of all, a framework of tough ash branches, each one carefully chosen, would be needed; the ends of each must be pointed and fixed into holes in the ground, dug opposite to each other in two parallel lines, so that the whole framework, when completed, would look like a line of steady deeply-driven half-hoops of ash. A very strong branch had to be lashed to the top of the half-hoops to hold the whole together, and this must all be tested and tried before the thatching was even begun.
"The whole thing will take some days at least," Robin remarked to his fellow-campers as they sat round their fire.
"And when that's done, what'll we do next, I wonder?" remarked Peter.
But a great many things were going to be done that no one among the campers had any expectation of whatever!