“I’d wash dishes for a month if I could get hold of that rat,” answered Alex, angrily. “He came near wrecking the Rambler!”
“Well,” Clay said, “we may as well be getting the motors into shape. We can’t stay on this island long.”
“If we do, there’s no knowing what will happen,” Jule suggested. “We’ve had two letters and a runaway to-night and the next thing is likely to be a stick of dynamite.”
“Say, suppose we repair the electric apparatus and get away from this vicinity right now,” suggested Case, “I don’t like the looks of things.”
“Now, look here,” Alex cut in, “I’m ready to get out of this section, but do you mind what the first letter said about going north? Now that means something. If the first letter hadn’t told us to go north, and the men who threw the second letter hadn’t believed that we were obeying instructions, we wouldn’t have been interfered with. Now, there’s a friendly force here, and a hostile force. The friendly people may be mistaken in our identity, but that doesn’t alter the fact that the hostile element is out to do us a mischief.
“I’d like to find out what it is the friendly force expects us to do. If we can learn that, we’ll know why the hostile force is opposing us. And so, it looks to me that instead of running away, we would better find out what is wanted of us. How does that strike you, fellows? Isn’t that deduction worthy of Sherlock Holmes?”
“All right,” Clay declared, “I’m willing to investigate, but we mustn’t spend all our time looking into one mystery, for if we have the same luck we had on other trips, we are likely to come across several more before we go back to Chicago.”
“I’d like to know,” Case said, as they brought up an extra anchor and a new cable, “why we were dumped on this island.”
“To get us out of the way, probably,” Jule commented. “They undoubtedly expected to steal or wreck the Rambler.”
“But the Rambler,” Alex laughed, “has the luck of the Irish, so she’s still able to travel.”