There was a small gray canvas tent, a half-dead fire, cooking apparatus scattered about, a pair of wet trousers hung up to dry, but no one in sight. Tom called but got no answer. It was, he judged, the camp of a trout-fishing party, and they were probably somewhere out on the water. Then he caught sight of a boat drawn half ashore and went down to look at it.
It was a flat-bottomed punt, a most unusual craft for the north woods, but it had a more unusual feature still. A square foot of the bottom had been cut out and a glass-bottomed box inserted. Tom perceived its purpose at once. He had seen the like before. It is a device adopted by nature students for looking into the depths of clear water; but he had not expected to find a naturalist on the Coboconk lakes.
Considerably puzzled, he looked up and down the water and thought he made out the shape of a floating canoe far up at the end of Big Coboconk, but he was not sure. Again he shouted two or three times, and at last he went back to his own place again. Crossing the gravelly ridge below the barn, he saw the footprints clearly, and saw too that some one had dug into the gravel and had driven deep holes as if with an iron bar. Prospecting, perhaps. There was mineral in the district, Tom knew. He wondered if there might be a mine on his property. But, if there had been one, Cousin Dave would surely have discovered it; for Dave had done a good deal of prospecting, though without any great success.
Tom half expected another visit from the strange campers that day and kept within sight of his dwelling, but no one appeared. On the following morning he went over to the river, got his canoe, and paddled down to the lake. He went slowly up through the narrows into the bigger lake, and saw, as he had rather expected, two boats lying a quarter of a mile ahead and not far from the shore.
One was a canoe, with a single man in it, doing nothing. The other boat, the punt, looked empty at that distance, but as he watched it a man’s head and shoulders rose out of it and then sank again. The canoeman, leaning over, shoved the punt ahead a little.
Tom paddled quickly up, highly interested. The canoeman turned and looked, and then the occupant of the punt rose out of his crouching position in the bottom. He was a tall man of middle age, with a black mustache and a square jaw. He was roughly dressed as any woodsman, yet somehow he did not seem quite to belong to the wilderness. His assistant was a much less pleasing individual, an unmistakable frontiersman, rough and slovenly, with a shock of grizzled reddish hair, and a surly and suspicious face.
“Hello!” called the punter, in answer to Tom’s hail. “Where’d you come from? Camping? Fishing?”
“No, I live back yonder,” said Tom, indicating the direction. “I think you paid a call there the other day. I was away at Oakley.
“Oh!” exclaimed the other. “I thought that was Jackson’s homestead.”
“Yes. I’m Tom Jackson,” returned Tom, quietly.