"I'm stuck on the fence!" shouted Jerry in return. "Go ahead. I'll be along directly."
But he noticed that Dave stood waiting on the shore when he finally managed to release himself and broke through the thin fringe of willows. "All right, Dave," he urged. "Let's not be losing any time."
For a while the going was much easier. On Jerry's side a wide reach of sand lay smooth and firm in the pale moonlight. On Dave's side a few yards of sand lay between a steep bank and the water's edge, but every few hundred feet a shallow creek broke through and forced wading.
There was no chance for the boat to have stranded here, and the boys hurried along. Within a mile the character of the ground changed. Now the water lapped along under high, steep banks, with tiny, willow-covered islands alternating with bass-haunted snags of dislodged trees barricaded with driftwood. The moon cast queer shadows and more than once Jerry's heart felt a wild thrill as he fancied he saw a boat hull outlined against the silvered current.
Every few hundred yards the two boys stopped and sent encouraging shouts across the widening water. It was a lonesome, disheartening task, with every step making the task all the harder. Deep bays cut into the shore line; the feeder creeks grew wider and deeper. The night air was chill on their dripping shoulders. Plum Run was no longer a run—it was a real river, and Dave's voice sounded far off when he came out on some bare point to shout his constant:
"Nothing doing—yet."
They were now on a part of the river that was comparatively strange to them. Jerry had more than once followed the Plum this far south, but it had always been by boat, or at best on the west bank, Dave's territory, where a chain of lakes followed the course of the river. Each new twist and turn sent a shiver of nervous dread through him. Many the story of rattlers and copperheads he had heard from fishermen and campers—and the night was filled with unexpected and disturbing noises, overhead and underfoot. Of course he knew that snakes are not abroad at night, but the knowledge did not help his nerves.
Moreover, they were drawing near Lost Island, and no boy of Watertown had ever been known to cast a line within half a mile of that dreaded spot. For Lost Island was the "haunted castle" of the neighborhood. It was nothing more than a large, weed-and-willow-covered five acres, a wrecked dam jutting out from the east bank, and a great gaunt pile of foundation masonry standing high and dry on a bare knoll at the north end.
It had a history—never twice told the same. The dam had been dynamited, that much was sure. By whom, no one knew. The house, if ever a house had been built over those rain-bleached rocks, had been struck by lightning, hurricane, blown up by giant powder, rotted away—a dozen other tragic ends, as the whim of the story-teller dictated. The owner had been murdered, lynched, had committed suicide—no one knew, but everyone was positive that there was something fearfully, terribly wrong with Lost Island.
It was one of the few islands in Plum Run which was not flooded over by the spring freshets, and the land was fertile, yet no one had ever been known to live there through a season; this in spite of the fact that Lost Island was known as "squatter's land," open to settlement by anyone who desired it.