“I knew it!” Alex cried. “We are in between two hostile interests again! It always happens that way. But we like it!”
“I have been thinking,” Captain Morgan went on, “that the men who attempted to wreck the Rambler are not river pirates at all, but men sent here to obstruct, as far as possible, those in search of the lost channel. It certainly looks that way.”
“Well,” Clay remarked, “they haven’t got any motor boat, and we’ve got one that can almost beat the sun around the earth, so we’ll just run away from them. In an hour after you leave here, we’ll be in the east river looking for the channel which is said to have connected it in past years with the one paralleling it on the west.”
The sailors who had been searching now reported to the captain that no strangers had been seen by them on the island, and it was agreed that the outlaws, whether wreckers or men employed to obstruct the search for the lost channel, had taken to the south shore. Captain Morgan shook the boys warmly by the hand as they parted.
“If you say any more about your plans,” he said, “I’ll be going with you. Already I can sense the smoke of your campfire, and smell the odor of the summer woods. There are fine fish up in those rivers, boys, great shiny, gamy things that fight like the dickens in the stream and melt like butter in the mouth.”
“We’ll send you out some,” promised Clay, and the steamer’s boat carried the boys back to the Rambler.
The needed repairs were soon accomplished, and when night fell the motor boat lay under a roof of leaves in a deep cove on one of the rivers behind the egg-shaped peninsula. Just above the anchorage the water tumbled, from a high ledge. The boys had no idea of remaining on board that night, so they built a roaring campfire on shore and stretched hammocks from the trees.
“Right here,” Clay said as the moon rose, “right about where we are sitting, there may be a lost channel!”
“That’s all right,” grinned Alex, “but I don’t see myself getting very wet sitting on it.”
“I don’t blame any old channel for getting lost in this wild country,” Case contributed. “We’ll be lucky if we don’t get lost ourselves. Hear the owls laughing at us!”