“Well, if only they’d get cold feet it’d make it all the easier for us,” Josh broke in with, just then. “And don’t I wish every fellow had a gun like Jack, here. Then we’d have ’em dead to rights, and they’d soon throw up the sponge, when we started in to bombard the lot with shot. Say, Jack, you expect to use that same little Marlin, I hope; for what’s the good of a gun when you won’t make it squeal?”
“I’ll use it to let them know we’re armed, first of all,” Jack explained, “and that might go a good ways toward making them surrender.”
“But hold on, Jack, don’t do that if the two shells are all you’ve got. A nice sort of thing that’d be, to scare the game, and not have anything to pink ’em with afterwards,” Josh went on to say, in alarm.
“Oh! I’ve got a few more in my pocket,” returned the other. “I was wise enough to slip some shells in my coat before we left camp the first time. Don’t worry about that, Josh. There! wasn’t that a man’s head bobbing up above the stern of the other boat just then?”
It certainly must have been, for immediately there came a hoarse hail across the intervening water.
“Hello! there, you in the motor boats!”
“Hello! yourself! what d’ye want?” demanded George; before Jack could say a word; for George did everything so quickly it was hard to get ahead of him.
“We want you to sheer off, and mind your own business, hear that?” replied the party aboard the white boat belonging to Algernon.
“That’s just what we are doing,” Jack called out. “You’ve made a mistake and gone off with the wrong boat. Yours is up above, on the island; and that one belongs to a friend of ours. We want it; and what’s more, we’re going to take it back. Do you get that?”
The two men could be heard talking hurriedly together. Possibly they were trying to figure out just what the boy meant and if it could be that their real identity were as yet unsuspected. If the boys simply looked on them as boat thieves, perhaps they might manage to deceive them in some way. But when the man spoke once more it was evident that they could not wholly reconcile themselves to this idea.