Of course anxious thoughts chased through the minds of the three boys as they hurried along. Will was evidently in trouble. Bluff, remembering the ospreys, pictured him lying at the foot of a tall tree with perhaps one of his legs broken. That would be an awkward condition of affairs to be sure, with their camp so far removed from real civilization.
Jerry, too, was imagining something of the sort, and wondering if they would have to make a litter in order to carry poor Will back to the cabin. He even went further and considered the question as to how they could take him to a doctor; or else force the old hermit of the Dennison estate to let them carry their injured comrade there.
Not so Frank. He had already made the discovery that the voice came from up in the air, and hence had quite settled in his mind what had happened.
"He got up all right, you see, fellows," was the way Frank explained it to the others, "but it wasn't so easy to creep down again. Perhaps he dropped the rope he had used, and couldn't clasp the trunk of the tree because it was so large."
"We'll soon know," ventured Jerry, "because I can see one of the fish-hawks flying over that tall tree, and I guess the nest must be in that."
"Here he is over here, you see," observed Frank. "He figured out that with the sun heading into the west he ought to get on that side of the nest in order to make a fine picture. So he climbed up and settled himself, waiting until the mother bird came with a fish for the fledglings, which may have taken hours."
"I see him!" cried Bluff. "There, he's waving to us now! And I'm glad to know our chum hasn't gone and broken a leg; for besides the pain to him it would upset all our fine plans for a good time up here."
Will was sitting astride the lowermost limb of an enormous tree standing about forty or fifty feet to the west of the one in which the nest of the ospreys could be plainly seen, close to the top.
Will grinned sheepishly as his chums came underneath. He was some thirty feet from the ground as his legs dangled over the lowermost limb. And Frank, remembering his theory, on looking at the base of the tree discovered that the rope loop did lie there. Will had inadvertently allowed it to slip from his grasp after reaching the lower branch and clambering up on to it.
He had removed his shoes and socks in order to make good use of his toes in climbing, just as do the blacks of the cocoanut islands. But later on, after getting his long delayed pictures of the old osprey feeding its fledglings, when the ardent photographer attempted to descend the big tree he found it an impossible task.