"Could it have anything to do with that wonderful fleet that is always on the move, coming and going, according to the weather? How about that, Ned?" demanded Teddy.
Ned shook his head, to indicate that he did not know. There were some things calculated to spring up from time to time, which, as leader of the Wolf Patrol, he did not claim to know. This was one of them.
Fainter grew the rumble of voices belonging to the unseen sailors; and the click-clack of oars working in the rowlocks also began to die away.
Francois had listened with the rest. Being only an ignorant voyageur, with very little knowledge save along his chosen lines, of course the French Canadian was apt to have more or less superstition in his system. It was a heritage he had imbibed with his mother's milk.
Francois had heard more or less about this weird, disappearing fleet of vessels that, for some time now, had been acting so mysteriously along the coast of the big bay. Like most of his class, he believed that they were unreal, and possibly but the ghosts of brave vessels that in years gone by may have ploughed the green waters of Hudson Bay.
Although he said little or nothing on the subject, Francois did considerable thinking along those lines. He cast frequent uneasy looks away out through the mist, as though fearful lest he suddenly come face to face with some terrible mystery.
To him those voices were anything but natural. Possibly, he even pictured some ghostly figures sitting in a phantom boat, and speeding over the surface of the historical sheet of water, about which so much that is remarkable has been written, and, also, handed down from father to son, among the rangers and caribou hunters of the Canadian bush.
It had died away completely by now. To the scouts, this simply signified that the men in the boat had probably drawn so far away from the shore that their voices no longer carried across the water as before; but to Francois it meant that the phantoms had chosen to withdraw, it might be sinking beneath the surface of the bay.
After this little adventure the boys fell to thinking again about the stories they had heard about the fleet that seemed to continually hover along the shore of Hudson Bay, now appearing, and then vanishing in the most remarkable manner.
Just because Ned did not seem fit to announce that they would come to a halt and endeavor to get in communication with the vessel, to which the men in the rowboat undoubtedly belonged, Teddy and Jimmy jumped to the conclusion that he, too, must be uneasy about the character of that ship.