Directly the top of a worn fur cap made its appearance above the gunwale of the boat, followed almost immediately by the head and shoulders of a man. Then Alex and Jule both rushed out of the cabin.
“He must be a peach, whoever he is, to come off to us in a canoe over that rough water to-night!” Alex cried. “I want to see that boat of his.”
The boat in which the stranger had put off was rocking viciously in the stream, and it was some seconds before he could secure a footing which promised a successful leap for the deck. When at last he came over the rail, the boys saw a heavily-built man with thin whiskers growing out of a dark face. His eyes were keen and black, and the hair hanging low down on his wide shoulders, was black, too, and straight.
Holding his boat line in one hand, in order that the craft might not drift away, he searched with the other hand in the interior pockets of a rough Jersey jacket for a second, and then brought forth a sealed package which he handed to Clay. As the boy took the package, the man who had delivered it sprang, without speaking a word, to the railing, hung for a moment with his feet in the air above the bobbing canoe, dropped, and was almost instantly lost in the darkness.
Leaning over the railing of the boat, wide-eyed and amazed, the four boys stood for a moment trying to pierce the line of darkness beyond the round circle of the prow light. Nothing was to be seen. The boat had come and gone in the darkness. The packet in Clay’s hands was the only evidence that it had ever existed. Alex was the first to speak.
“What do you know about that?” he shouted.
“They must have fine mail facilities on the St. Lawrence!” commented Case.
“That was only a ghost!” Jule asserted, with a wink at Alex. “That letter will go sailing up in the air in a minute.”
Clay opened the packet so strangely delivered and unfolded a crude map of a country enclosed between two rivers. These rivers, after running close together for a long distance, spread apart, like the two arms of a pair of tongs, at their mouths, making an egg-shaped peninsula which extended far into the main river. Back from the river shore, on this rude drawing, a narrow creek cut through the territory between the two rivers, making the peninsula an island.
Below this rude drawing of the rivers and the peninsula was another of an old-fashioned safe resting high up in a niche in a rocky wall. The face of the wall was cross-hatched, to show that it was in the shadows.