"You will have to wait a long while if you expect to be taken off," added Sam; "for all the people belonging to the place went off this morning in the Sylph, and they won't be back till night."
"It isn't ten o'clock in the forenoon yet, and they will not be back till dark, for they take their suppers on board," said Ash Burton, shrugging his shoulders at the prospect. "We shall get no dinner, and no supper, and it looks like a starving time ahead."
"You can bet I don't stay here without any dinner and without any supper," interposed Tom Topover. "If I don't get my dinner to home to-day, it will be because I get it somewhere else."
"I don't see how you are going to manage it. Do you mean to swim ashore?" asked Ash.
"I could do that if I wanted to, and so could the rest on us; but there is a better way," replied Tom, with a significant grin.
"A better way? What is it?" asked Sam.
"We ain't in the water, be we?" asked the late captain, with an expressive look at his companions, as though he desired to take the measure of them for a new enterprise.
"We be not," answered Ash, who had taken the job of correcting the leader's English, and had succeeded to a considerable extent. "We are not in the water: on the contrary, we are on board of the able and swift-sailing Goldwing; and we should be driven from her like cows from the corn if there were any of the officers of the school at home."
"Just so, but they are not at home. Most likely they are up to Whitehall or some other place at that end of the lake. Do you think I am going to stay here all day without any dinner and supper, when we might just as well use this boat as leave her alone?" demanded Tom Topover earnestly.
"It will be the safest way to let her alone," replied Ash, shaking his head. "You came very near being doomed to look through the bars of a gridiron for the next three or six months, over on the other side of the lake; and it will be well for you to keep a sharp lookout to windward, Tom."