“What the dickens gives you that idea?”
“I deduced it, Harry.”
CHAPTER XVI
GORDON INTERFERES IN FAMILY MATTERS
At six o’clock that night the two boys stood on the summit of Bulwagga Mountain, or on one of the summits, for Bulwagga has two peaks. It was the hardest afternoon’s work they had ever undertaken. Long before they threw down their burdens, two thousand feet above sea level, Gordon had ceased to talk and devoted his breath to panting. It was a tough, tedious climb, but the game was well worth the candle. They looked off upon an endless landscape, dotted here and there with toy houses and pigmy villages.
“What’s the use of sawing wood and laying bricks and building houses and churches,” said Harry, “if that’s all they amount to?”
Indeed, Bulwagga, standing silent and serene, close to the shore of the great lake, seemed to belittle everything. There lay Crown Point, a modest little cluster of tiny buildings. There lay the lake, almost under them, with all its little juttings and indentations plain to view. There was the Crown Point peninsula curving out into the middle of the lake and pointing northward like a great, clumsy thumb. Inside it was Bulwagga Bay.
Once upon a time, more than three centuries ago, the adventurous Champlain sailed up this great lake which bears his name, with an exploring party of merry Frenchmen. Instead of turning their prows eastward into the narrow channel formed by the peninsula, they sailed gayly into Bulwagga Bay, supposing that an open path lay before them. But the bay proved to be a trap. Down out of the fastnesses of the old mountain came the Mohawk savages, and the gay little company was caught like a rat. Harry, who knew the history of the lake, now saw just how it had happened. Many a time and oft had the bloody Mohawks made good use of this deceptive bay, and many who were caught and slaughtered there supposed they had reached the end of the winding sheet of water, for there was no sign posted on the end of the peninsula informing the explorer to turn to his left.
But now the old mountain, which had so long been the secret ally of the bloody Mohawk tribe, gave up the secret, as if to say: “You see how we worked it. Wasn’t it a great scheme?”
“Harry,” said Gordon, “I’m all in—let’s rest.”
“Your motion is unanimously carried,” said Harry, sitting down on a rock. “If I saw the camp ten feet in front of me now, I wouldn’t budge. Now that’s just about where I think the smoke was,” he continued, pointing down into the woods which extended from the base of the mountain to the lake; “and if I’m right, we’ve got a grandstand view on them, provided there’s a moon. Just as soon as they get their old logs blazing, we’ve got them. If—”