But as the walk started his blood circulating again, and his brain became active once more, he had a new idea. "Old Tod's a sly fox," he said to himself. "He's not going to be among the missing when the fun is on. He's going to take them down to his bass lake, and then he's going to slip away. He'll have to come back by land, so he'll probably take them to Last Shot Lake. It'll take them an hour to get there, but he can come back afoot in half that time if he's in a hurry—and I guess he is. He most likely will hang around half an hour before he thinks it's safe to make his getaway. That's two hours all told. In some fifteen or twenty minutes he ought to come skulking along through the woods.
"There's that hill yonder—it ought to make a good spy-post. Little
Jerry bids these parts a fond adieu."
Something like a strong quarter of a mile down the river, and perhaps that much inland, stood a lonesome hill, almost bare of trees save a clump of perhaps a dozen on the very summit. It was an ideal hiding place. Leaving the road after cutting through the river timber and following it a few hundred yards, he plunged into a dense growth of scrub oak and hazel brush that extended almost to the base of his hill.
He came to one bare spot, perhaps an acre in extent, and was about to leave the shelter of the brush for the comparatively easy going of the weedy grass, when, almost opposite him, he saw a figure emerge from the trees.
At first he thought it was Tod, and he chuckled to himself as he thought how quickly his guess had been proved true. But when a second stepped out close behind the first, Jerry realized that neither one was his friend, even before he noticed that both were carrying rifles.
A pair of hunters, no doubt, Jerry surmised, although he wondered idly what they would be hunting at this season of the year. Rabbits were "wormy" and the law prohibited the shooting of almost everything else. But "City hunters," Jerry derided, "from their clothes. They think bluejays and crows are good sport."
That the hunters were looking for birds was evident, for they kept their eyes turned toward the tree-tops. Thus it was that they did not see Jerry crouching in the brush a scant dozen feet from where they broke into the woods again. He was near enough to overhear them perfectly, but not a word could he understand, for they were talking very earnestly together in some outlandish tongue that, as Jerry said, made him seasick to try to follow. But as they talked they pointed excitedly, first toward the sky and then straight ahead, and that part of their conversation was perfectly understandable to the boy.
A sudden wild thought entered his mind. Here were two hunters out in the woods at a time when no real sportsmen carried anything but rods and landing nets. The mystery of their purpose reminded him of another mystery, and immediately his mind connected the two, even before he noticed the constant recurrence of a word that sounded much as a foreigner would pronounce "Lost Island." Jerry realized, even as the thought passed through his mind, that it was the wildest kind of guess, but it was enough to set him stealthily picking his way through the brush in the wake of the two.
He saw, just in time to avoid running smack into them, that just before they reached the road, although now out of the heavier woods, they had stopped and were talking together more excitedly than ever. Something had happened, Jerry realized at once, but he could not puzzle out what it was, although he looked and listened as intently as they seemed to be doing. He was about to give it up in disgust, when he became conscious of a queer droning noise, as of a swarm of bees, or a distant threshing machine. Strangely, the sound did not seem to be coming from the woods or fields about him, but from the blank sky itself.
Then he remembered how Tod had acted at breakfast—how he too, like these men, had been apparently staring into space. Jerry read the newspapers; he was an eager student of one of the scientific magazines; he had sat in Mr. Fulton's basement workshop and listened to many a discussion of the latest wonders of invention. But even then he did not at once realize that the sound he had been hearing really came from the sky, and that the purring noise was the whir of the propellers of an aeroplane.