“Well,” said Pierre, after a long pause, “what’s to be done? Have you thought of anything?”
“I have,” replied his father. “We’ll adopt Mr. Bell’s plan, only we’ll have to carry it out on a smaller scale. He’s going to take his prisoner to Cuba; but as we have no boat large enough to make so long a journey, we’ll have to take ours to Lost Island, and leave him there.”
“Why, that’s only forty miles away!” exclaimed Pierre.
“That’s plenty far enough. He can’t swim that distance; there’s nothing on the island that he can make a boat of; he will be out of the path of vessels going to and from New Orleans, and I’d like to know how he will reach the main shore again. He’ll stay there three or four days at any rate, and that’s all we want. By the end of that time we will have sold off our property, and taken ourselves safe out of the country; for, of course, we can’t stay here any longer. If he gets back in time to upset some of Mr. Bell’s plans, why, that’s no business of ours.”
“But how can we go to the island without a vessel?”
“We’ve got as good a vessel as we want. We’ll go in the pirogue. We’ll have to take care that the boy doesn’t freeze or starve to death before he is taken off the island,” continued Coulte, “and so we will give him an axe, a flint and steel, a blanket or two, and provisions enough to last him a week. When they are gone he must look out for himself.”
Another long pause followed, during which Pierre was evidently thinking over the plan his father had proposed. Chase thought it over too, and the longer he pondered upon it, the more earnestly he hoped that Pierre would find some serious objection to it, for it did not suit him at all. In the first place, there was the voyage of forty miles in the pirogue, the bare thought of which was enough to make Chase’s hair stand on end. The pirogue was a large canoe capable of holding about twenty men. It was furnished with a sail and centre-board, and before a light wind could run, as the students used to say, “like a scared deer.” She had considerable breadth of beam for a vessel of that description, and could not be easily overturned; but still she was not the craft that Chase, if he had been allowed to have his own way, would have selected for a voyage of forty miles across the Gulf, especially at that season of the year. There were not many chances in a thousand that she would accomplish the journey in safety.
In the next place there was the prospect of a lonely residence on the island, and that, under the existing circumstances, was by no means a pleasant thing to look forward to. Lost Island was a most inhospitable place. No one lived on it, and Chase had never heard of a vessel stopping there. It was low and sandy, and in calm weather there were perhaps a thousand acres of it out of water; but during a storm the waves washed all over the lower end of it, leaving in sight only a solitary bluff, about a hundred feet high, which was the only spot on the island that was covered with timber. Like most boys of his age, Chase had read and admired Robinson Crusoe, and if his captors had only given him a gun, plenty of ammunition, and a companion like his friend Wilson or the jolly little Featherweight, he would have had no objections to imitating that adventurer’s manner of life for a short time. There would be something romantic in it, and they would have so much to talk about when they came back! But to be put off there by himself in the dead of winter, with only a week’s provisions, and a fair prospect of starving to death when the supply was exhausted, was a different matter altogether. He could see no fun or romance in that, and he didn’t want to go to Lost Island! but Pierre evidently thought it just the place for him, for, after turning the matter over in his mind for some minutes, he said to his father:
“Your plan is the best that could be adopted. We’ll start this very night, and we’ll go down now and put the pirogue in the water and get every thing ready. I will go after the sail and oars, and you can lock up the house.”