CHAPTER I.
A LAKE HURON "HUMMER."
"Looks as if it might be blowing up for nasty weather, Tom."
Jack Dacre, the younger of the Bungalow Boys, spoke, as his head emerged from the engine room hatchway of the sixty-foot, motor-driven craft, Sea Ranger.
Tom nodded, and spun the spokes of the steering wheel ever so little. The Sea Ranger responded by heading up a trifle more into the seas, which were already growing threatening.
"I've been thinking the same thing for some time," he said presently. "If Alpena wasn't so far behind us, I'd turn back now."
"We can't be more than three miles off shore. Why not head in toward it?"
The elder Dacre boy shook his head.
"Don't know the coast," he said; "and it's a treacherous one."
The sky, cloudless but a short time before, was now heavily overcast. To the northwest, black, angry-looking clouds were banked in castellated masses. Their ragged edges would have shown a trained eye that, as sailors say, "there was wind behind them."
The waters of Lake Huron, recently sparkling under the bright sun, were now of a dull, leaden hue. The long water rows began to rise sullenly in heaving billows, over the crests of which the Sea Ranger plunged and wallowed.