They had by now cleared quite considerable ground, even though their progress was in anything but a direct line. On account of dense patches of thorn bushes Paul found it necessary to make various detours; but then this did not matter to any great extent; for while it added to the length of their journey, at the same time it promised to reveal more of the island to their search.
One thing surprised Paul. They found the trees so dense that most of the time it was possible to obtain only glimpses of the sky above. Fortunately the sun continued to shine. He thought it must be pretty dingy here on a cloudy day. And the more he saw of Cedar Island the less he wondered that some of the ignorant country people believed it to be haunted.
Bobolink must have been allowing his mind to run in a similar groove, for presently pushing up alongside Paul, he remarked in a whisper:
"Gee! did you ever see a more spooky place than this is, Paul? Now, if a fellow did believe in ghosts, which of course I don't, here's where he'd expect to run across some of them. Look at that hollow over yonder, would you? There goes a woodchuck dodging back into his hole in the bank. Ain't it queer how all these animals ever got across from the mainland to this island? Why, seemed like all of half a mile to me."
"Wait till we get on top of that hill, and perhaps the thing won't seem so queer, after all," replied Paul. "I was thinking the same way; and then it struck me that the land might be a whole lot closer to the island on the northern side. Why, how do we know but what it's only a narrow strait there?"
"I wonder, now," mused Bobolink, who always found much food for thought in what information he extracted from the scout master.
They kept on for some five minutes longer, under about the same conditions. Paul, however, began to believe that they must by now be drawing somewhere near the foot of the little hill that arose near the center of the island, as closely as they could figure from their camp at the southern end.
The result of their watchfulness was made apparent when Tom Betts suddenly declared that he had seen something that looked like a blacksmith's forge just beyond a screen of bushes ahead of them.
Cautiously advancing, the seven scouts presently found themselves looking upon the exact object Tom had mentioned, which proved that his powers of observation were good. It was a forge of some sort, with a bellows attached, and a wind screen, but no shelter over the top; which fact would seem to indicate that it must be in the nature of a field smithy, used for certain purposes to heat or melt metal.
There being no sign of life around, Paul and his six followers swarmed out of the brush, and surrounded the forge, which was about as unlikely a thing to be run across, away in this forsaken quarter of the country, as anything they could imagine.