“If this is the boat, we ought to be a little more careful about being seen, for the owner of it may be somewhere near here, and he knows much more than we do.”
Frank spoke cautiously as he very slowly turned to look beyond the shoreline of the river for any habitation. On this side the bank was grown with a dense thicket.
The rowboat was of the same general appearance as a thousand other rowboats. It was of average size and of the same semi-flat design which the boys might have seen all along the Harrapin. The oars were lying about five feet away, side by side, not hidden. The boat was not tied—merely pulled up from the river so that it would not float away.
Frank stood quietly looking at it, taking in everything about the boat and its surroundings, which were weeds and coarse shrubbery of the river-bank variety.
Why were they led to choose this particular boat? What reason had they for thinking that this rowboat, and this one only, had been the one which they had met that night on the river? Why could it not have been some other rowboat, farther upstream or downstream? Why could not the rowboat they were seeking not just as well be out on the river somewhere, busy at a rowboat’s regular tasks?
These were some of the thoughts which flashed through Frank’s mind as the five boys stood looking upon it.
“Let’s see what is beyond the thicket,” suggested Lanky, turning to lead the way through the undergrowth.
“It was just a hunch, that was all,” mused Frank, not moving away. They had come out to look for a rowboat, a rowboat of very common design, perhaps, and certainly one which they had seen hastily, in the dark, under the glare of a dancing searchlight, in moments of excitement. To choose this particular one was certainly following a hunch.
If they had seen three rowboats pulled up from the stream, as this one was, which would they have chosen, even though all three had been of different sizes and general shapes?
Lanky, Buster, Paul and Ralph were starting through the brush and had gotten twenty or thirty feet from the boat before Frank followed.