“Why don’t you put out the lights?” he asked.
“We turned them on to direct you boys home,” was the reply.
“You boys home?” repeated Clay.
“Yes, you boys!” answered Jule. “Alex jumped out about as soon as you left. Did you see him anywhere?”
“I don’t think he came out on this side” Clay replied.
“If he didn’t,” Jule went on, “he’s in some mixup over on the south arm. There’s doings of some kind over there.”
“How do you know?” asked Clay.
“Because, just a few moments after we discovered that the boy had gone, a large rowboat came in at the mouth of the lagoon, passed along our port side and ducked into the bank some distance down. We couldn’t see her, of course, only just for a second as she came opposite us, and then only indistinctly, but we could hear her when she landed.”
“The question before the house now,” Case observed, “is about getting you on board again. You can jump from the gunwale to the shore but you can’t jump from the shore back to the gunwale.”
“There’s a long board under the forward deck between the storage bins,” Clay answered. “Get that out and I’ll climb it.”