“Do you expect the alligators will have remained there all this time?” questioned Dixon.
“It’s hardly likely,” admitted Tremaine. “Yet, that particular island will be a good starting point from which to look about. Of course, the chances are that we shan’t find the ’gators. Isn’t that right, Randolph?”
“Yes, sir,” replied Jeff, slowly. “The only sure way to get some really good sport will be to leave your house some morning before daylight, go right along the lake and be well into the Everglades by ten o’clock. That would give us about six hours to look for ’gators, and we would be pretty sure to bag one or two in that time. But ’gators know how to be wary, sir, as you know from having hunted them before.”
“Yes,” agreed the host. “I’ve known a party to be out four days before one of the rascals was landed at last. But he was a whopping fellow—almost as big as one of the pair Miss Silsbee and Halstead encountered this morning.”
“Don’t you suppose,” laughed Dixon, turning to the girl, “that your eyes magnified, just a bit, the pair you saw this morning?”
“I know my eyes must have exaggerated,” laughed Ida, “for, at the time, I’d have been willing to depose that neither brute was less than a hundred and fifty feet long, which all the natural history books declare to be impossible.”
“There’s the island, isn’t it, Miss Silsbee!” Captain Halstead asked, after a while.
“Yes,” nodded the girl. “I’m sure it must be. Yes! There’s the identical tree you robbed of the moss that we forgot to bring away with us.”