Josh looked at Jack.
“Sure as you live, he’s following that trail, Jack,” he said.
“That’s only natural,” remarked the other, “because, you see, it was mighty plain, as though lots of people had gone back and forth.”
“Yes,” observed Josh, simply, “if them chaps were camping in the cabin, and going out fishing every day, of course they’d make a well-worn trail down to this cove here, where their boats must have been tied up. I’ve been thinking, Jack, that p’raps they’re engaged in some sort of fishing that’s illegal, such as setting nets against the law. Say, wouldn’t that be an idea now? And if true, it must explain just why they watched us so close. They thought we might be wardens getting on the track of their business. How’s that for a guess, fellows?”
“Sounds kind of fishy,” remarked George.
“Scaly, I should say,” Herb spoke up.
But Jack said nothing. He was thinking along the same line Josh had suggested, but in an altogether different way from the lanky cook of the Wireless.
To tell the truth, Jack would have been pleased could he have slipped ashore to observe what the professor from Ann Arbor could be doing just then; but he did not dare venture. It would look too much like impudence. As he himself had said, if the gentleman had wished for their company, he certainly must have asked them to go ashore with him.
As to his being deeply interested in ghosts, and a patient investigator of remarkable manifestations for years, Jack took all that with a grain of salt. Perhaps it might be so, but Jack believed he was not far wrong in believing that Professor Marshland had only mentioned the fact to excuse his evident desire to go ashore and look around.
He was gone a long while. Indeed, Jack guessed that perhaps the gentleman could have explored the whole island in the time that elapsed before he again showed up. Still, there was also a chance that he might have been doing something in connection with the old cabin.