One day, as they were poling along, Tom gave Dick a queer look, and nodded in the direction of a fir-crowned gravelly island lying about a mile away.
“When’s the Robinson Crusoe business going to begin, Dick?” he said.
Dick laughed, but it was not a merry laugh, for the memory was a painful one, and mingled with recollections of times when everyone was suspicious of him, or seemed to be; and he was fast relapsing into an unhappy morbid state.
“What was the Robinson Crusoe business?” said Marston; and on being told, he laughingly proposed going on.
“Let’s have a look at the place, boys,” he said. “Why shouldn’t we have a summer-house out here to come and stay at sometimes, shooting, fishing, or collecting. We cannot always work.”
The pole was vigorously plied, and at the end of half an hour they had landed, to find the place just as they remembered it to have been the year before. There were the bushes, the heath, and heather in the gravelly soil, and the fir-trees flourishing.
“A capital place!” said the engineer. “I tell you what, boys, we’ll bring Big Bargle over, and a couple of men; the wheelwright shall cut us some posts, rafters, and a door, and we’ll make a great hut, and—”
He stopped short at that point and stared, as they all stood in the depths of the little fir-wood, with the water and reed-beds hidden from sight. For there, just before them, as if raised by magic, was the very building Mr Marston had described, and upon examination they found it very dry and warm, with a bed of heath in one corner.
“Some sportsman has forestalled us,” said the engineer. “One of the farmers, I suppose, from the other side of the fen.”
They came away, with the lads sharing the same feeling of disappointment, for the little island was robbed of all its romance. It was no longer uninhabited, and the temptation to have a hut there was gone.