"I'll stay in the punt," said Dick. "I'm not fond of crawling through soft mud. Then, if you put up some birds, they'll probably fly over me."
They paddled ashore and left him with the punt, Andrew showing him two small rollers, which would help him to launch her if he wished to come after them. The sand was soft and made a sucking noise about their sea-boots, but this was the only sound except the faint ripple of the tide. The shore was hidden and there was nothing visible beyond the stretch of sloppy flat that vanished into the mist. The haze, however, was not thick, and faint moonlight filtered through.
"What do you expect to find here?" Whitney asked.
"I don't know. I'm curious about the buoy and I imagine that the fellow Dick was with wanted us to clear out. He was right in saying that we'd brought up in an exposed place; but why did he tell us ducks were plentiful down west?"
Whitney made a sign of agreement.
"It's certainly suspicious."
They went on while the sand got softer, but they saw nothing except a few small wading birds and a black-backed gull. Then Andrew stopped near the outer end of the bank. Something black floated in the midst of a tide-ripple, about forty yards away.
"Another buoy and a bigger one, marking the fairway to the gut," he said thoughtfully. "With that and the compass course to the corks we saw, I'd take a boat drawing eight feet up to the burnfoot at five hours' flood, on an average tide."
"Eight feet draught would give you a pretty big boat; a vessel of about a hundred tons would float on that. But what would bring her here?"
"That's the point," said Andrew. "I believe old wooden schooners sometimes take cargoes of coal up these gutters and dump it into carts on the beach, but I'm not quite satisfied."