“You mean that shot you thought you heard?” broke in Steve excitedly.
“The shot I’m sure I heard, you mean,” Phil corrected, and then went on to tell about the first time he thought he had caught sight of a man slipping from the cave. “I thought at the time, I must have dreamed it,” he finished. “But now of course I know it was as real as my adventure to-night.”
“Well, what are we going to do about it?” asked Dick, who was always eager for action. “Why couldn’t we make a surprise attack upon those ruffians and clean them out—”
“It’s nearly morning,” Phil interrupted the wild scheme. “By the time we reached them they’d probably be up and stirring and your surprise would come to nothing. Beside,” he added with an unpleasant memory of the lagoon, “we would have to wait till the tide went out, anyway. We’d have to swim a stretch of about fifty yards of water that’s packed full of sharks.”
He had not told them yet about his narrow escape from death and now Jack Benton leaned forward, intense interest on his face.
“Then how did you get here?” he demanded.
“I swam that fifty yards of water,” Phil answered, quietly.
CHAPTER XXV
IN DEADLY DANGER
It took the boys a moment or two to catch the full significance of this simple question and answer. Phil never boasted of his exploits. He never spoke of them unless directly questioned.
But suddenly they realized just what his simple answer meant. He had swum safely through fifty yards of shark-infested water! Impossible. It couldn’t be done.