"Well, they haven't skipped out of sight yet," continued Jack, chuckling as he handed the glasses over to Frank to have a try.
In turn all of them took a look, and no one found reason to differ from what Jack had ventured to declare in the beginning. They were, without question, looking then and there on the clump of boats about which there had been so much talk made. Of course, at that distance there was no way of finding out the character of the several boats, or more than guess at what they were doing, away out from the shore.
"Strikes me that it might be some queer sort of mirage, like that you sometimes see on the sandy desert." Teddy suggested, after he had gazed intently at the picture for a full minute through the lenses of the field-glasses.
"Oh! they have the same sort of deception at sea," declared Jack; "only sailors call it the fata morgana. When you're on the desert, it generally takes the form of a lovely running stream of water, which you're crazy to reach and suck up. But the shipwrecked tar always sees a vessel coming to his relief, which keeps on rushing through the water, right up over reef and everything and disappears over the island leaving him broken-hearted at the deception caused by conditions in the atmosphere."
Jack knew considerable about these things, for he had been in strange lands, even before he took to roaming around with Ned, when the latter entered the employ of the Government Secret Service.
"All you say is true enough, Jack," the patrol leader told him, "but in this case it isn't a deception. All of us can see the smoke hanging low down, that tells of steam vessels of some type out there, possibly trawlers, fishing. But we didn't enlist in this business intending to solve any riddles connected with Hudson Bay. I've been told that there is no place in Northern latitudes where so many strange stories have originated, as this same big sheet of salt water. Four-fifths of it have never been fully explored, so that they do not yet know what may be here."
Jimmy had been silent while all this talk was going on. But it could be readily believed that his restless mind was not inactive. He proved this by suddenly nodding his head, and looking up at Ned in that shrewd way he had of doing, whenever a particularly brilliant idea appealed to him.
"Chances are they're a blooming bad lot, that's what," he went on to say, as if he meant every word of it. "I wouldn't be a bit surprised if they turned out to be bloody pirates after all."
"Oh! perhaps Captain Kidd and his men come back to life again, eh, Jimmy?" suggested Teddy, with a laugh.
Jimmy turned and gave the speaker a scornful look.