“What’s the matter?” asked Mr. Brown. “I want to catch that fellow and find out who he is.”
“Had you better go?” asked his wife. “Would it be safe?”
“Why, I’m not afraid of him!” laughed the father of Bunny and Sue. “He’s afraid of us. See how he ran!”
“Yes, but there may be others besides him,” said Mrs. Brown. “They may be hiding in the bushes and they may have sent him on ahead to spy on us. Besides, if you go away from us, this man might circle around and scare Bunny and Sue.”
“We’re not afraid of being scared by a wild man,” declared the little boy.
“Perhaps I had better not leave you to chase this man,” said Mr. Brown, after thinking it over. “We’ll go back to our grass-hut camp and I’ll get Will and Sam to come with me. We’ll chase this fellow and find out who he is. He looks to me like a white man.”
“I think he is a white man,” agreed Mrs. Brown. “But perhaps he has been shipwrecked and living on this island so long by himself that he is out of his mind and has gone wild.”
“Maybe,” her husband admitted. “Anyhow, Will and Sam and I will search for him. Well, we’ve had some surprises to-day, and now it will be best, I think, to go back to our own little camp. Though if this wild man isn’t going to use his comfortable little house I’d like to have it to live in.”
“It is better than the hut,” Mrs. Brown said. “But we couldn’t come here until that fellow is caught,” and she waved her hand toward the underbrush in which the strange creature had vanished. “It’s his.”
Bunny and Sue looked with wide-open eyes in the same direction hoping, yet also half fearing, to catch another glimpse of the man with the long black hair and beard. But he did not show himself.