Uncle Teddy took the Hares across the lake in the launch and set them down at the edge of the woods. They struck out through the trees, chipping the trail on the trunks with a sharp hatchet, and working their way around the curve of the shore line to St. Pierre. There they rested and bought ice cream and while they were eating it Katherine had one of her periodical inspirations.
“Let’s keep right on going until we get back to camp, and not stop anywhere at all,” she suggested. “Won’t we lead the others a fine chase, though? They’ll be dead by the time they get there.”
“What about us?” asked Gladys. “We’ll be dead ourselves.”
“I suppose we will,” admitted Katherine, who hadn’t thought of this before, “but it will be worth it. Who’ll be game?”
“I know a way to fix it so we won’t be dead,” said Pitt, the crafty. Pitt could always use his head to save his heels, and was a very Ulysses for cunning.
“How?” they all asked.
“Leave a note for the others on that last tree we blazed, telling them to follow the sand beach around to the Point of Pines. There aren’t any trees along 197 the beach so they won’t think anything about our not blazing a trail. Then we’ll simply rent a boat and cut straight across the lake to the Point of Pines. From there we’ll go on blazing the trail back to the place opposite Ellen’s Isle where we are to signal Uncle Teddy. By cutting across the corner of the lake that way we’ll save three miles that the others will have to walk, and they’ll wonder and wonder how we got so far ahead of them.” The prospect of turning the hare and hound chase into a joke on the Hounds was too funny to pass up, and with giggles and chuckles they pinned the note on the tree back at the edge of the woods where the road ran toward St. Pierre; then they rented two rowboats and piled into them. Some distance to the east of St. Pierre stood the old abandoned lighthouse, and they had to row past it. It stood out in the water, several hundred feet from the shore, on an island so tiny that it did no more than give a foothold for the tower.
“Let’s stop and go into it,” said Katherine. “I’ve never seen a lighthouse close up before. And you ought to get a grand view of the lake and the islands from that little balcony that runs around the top. Maybe we can see the others trailing after us.”
The rest were also anxious to see the old lighthouse and as their short cut across the lake would gain them at least an hour they decided there was plenty of time to go inside. So the boys rowed 198 alongside and made the boats fast and they all went up.
“It’s horribly dilapidated and messy,” said Gladys, viewing with fastidious distaste a pile of crumbled bricks and mortar which lay at the foot of the stairway, the result of an explosion which had blown a hole in the wall.