He backed the Osprey out from between the islets, turned her, and pushed his way back to the open water. Then, having a favoring wind, he hoisted his sail, and the Osprey went skimming over the waves on the homeward track.
CHAPTER XXI THE GREAT SECRET
So eager was Alec to return to his investigations that he slipped back to the oyster-beds that very night, so as to be on hand at the earliest possible moment next day. His mind was afire, his whole being was keyed up. He was like a hound on a hot scent. He felt that he had his quarry almost within his reach. He wanted to press on at top speed until he grasped the prize. Neither storm nor calm, neither tide nor sickness, could long have delayed him; for Alec possessed that unusual quality of mind which made him rise superior to obstacles, once his interest was thoroughly aroused. Things that to some boys would have appeared as effective obstacles became to Alec, when he was thus aroused, only difficulties to be overcome. One by one he had surmounted all the barriers that he had so far encountered. Each victory made him only the keener to win another. Of all his struggles, the effort to learn the truth about the oyster had interested him most deeply, because he knew that exact knowledge along that line was the very corner-stone of his success, or, more accurately, of the success he was striving to build.
So daylight found Alec astir and already on his way to Captain Hardy's oyster-bed. For the facts that Alec and Elsa had discovered concerning Hardy's bed and the existence of the depression in the bottom of the Bay, had given Alec an idea that he could hardly wait to test out. He meant to find the entire truth about the little channel. He doubted if any one else had discovered the little trough or furrow in the bottom of the Bay, and if they had, he doubted whether its significance had occurred to the discoverers.
Now he proceeded to the upper end of Hardy's bed, and, dropping his lead, found exactly where the edge of the furrow lay. He noted its position with relation to the corner stakes of the grounds. Then he proceeded slowly down-stream, sounding as he went, to try to locate the inner edge of the ditch. For several hundred feet he felt his way along. Then he took a heavy weight, tied to it a line of the proper length, and to that he fastened a stick a few feet long, to the upper end of which he tied a white cloth. He lowered the weight to the bottom, dropping it, as nearly as he was able, on the very edge of the furrow or ditch in the mud. Then he adjusted his line so that the stick floated perpendicularly, holding the white cloth aloft, a foot or two above the surface of the water. Then he dropped the Osprey down-stream some hundreds of feet, and once more locating the edge of the depression in the bottom, made and anchored a second floating marker. Examination showed him that the three points he had located—the one near Hardy's stakes and the two he had marked with flags,—were practically in a straight line. Once more he headed the Osprey down-stream, proceeding as far as he could go and still see his markers. Then he sounded, and found that he was still over the very edge of the depression. Apparently this depression ran in an almost perfectly straight line. Alec put down another flag. He now had marked the depression for a good many hundred yards.
Now he went back to his starting-point and began to study the current and the appearance of the water. The depression extended in exactly the same direction that the tide followed, so that the water would sweep straight through it, back and forth, back and forth ceaselessly, scouring it clean. Alec recalled what Roy had written him about the jetties at Galveston, and how the tide, sweeping in and out between them, had deepened the channel. To be sure, there were no jetties here to confine the flow of the tide to the depression, yet Alec felt sure that the current would keep the depression clean and perhaps even deepen it. For all time, at least for all calculable time, so far as he could see, the depression would remain in the bottom and create a vast slick along its side. In this slick he believed the oyster fry would be most numerous.