“But hold on,” Herb observed, “this doesn’t mean that the two over yonder ain’t what we took ’em to be, does it? There’s the white boat, you know, with the red trimming; didn’t Jack tell us he could see it plain enough anchored close to the shore? Just because they put a little pet dog underground don’t make ’em better, I reckon, eh, Jack?”
Jack did not reply immediately. The old doubts were commencing to work double time with him. He was beginning to question the truth of their solution of the problem. Again he could see the face of the younger fellow, who had seemed to be hardly more than a boy. Was that affectation only assumed? Might it not be a part of the nature of the fellow after all? Was he a desperate crook, who was able to put on an air of innocence; or could it be possible they had made a tremendous mistake, and that he was a pampered son of some rich man, cruising in his fine motorboat, with a mechanic as crew to do the rough work, while he played his part as skipper of the craft?
Yes, Jack was now in the Doubting Thomas class. He shook his head, and seemed to be trying to figure things out, as he laid the box on the ground, and covered it temporarily with the lid which had taken him so long to pry off.
“And if they are the bank thieves,” Herb went on to say, “what d’ye suppose they could have done with all that stuff they took away? Think they buried the same before they got here to this island, Jack, or could it still be on board the little white boat right now?”
“Oh! yes, that’s the stuff; how about it, Jack?” George went on to add.
“We sure did fall all over ourselves in making this blunder,” admitted Josh, “and it’s up to us now to get busy and try to make things square.”
“Of course,” said Jack, slowly, as though he might be revolving this last idea in his mind, “that’s possible. If these are the right men, and they’ve not got rid of the plunder up to now, why, it stands to reason it would be somewhere on board, that’s right.”
“But seems to me, Jack,” remarked Herb, suspiciously, “you’re beginning to hedge a heap. Just a little while ago you were dead sure these fellows must be the two robbers. Now you say ‘if they are.’ How’s that? Didn’t you see their boat, and wasn’t it just what that newspaper account said the suspicious craft looked like.”
“Boys, I admit all that,” the other went on to say, “but if you stop and think, the article in the paper didn’t say positively that the white boat belonged to the bold bank thieves—only that it had been seen hanging around, like it might be in hiding, and they thought it must have for a crew the two yeggs who broke into the Lawrence bank. There’s some difference, you’ll admit between making a positive statement, and just guessing things.”
“Well, for one, I still believe they are the men that are wanted,” said George, to prove that he had not been convinced otherwise.