“Because affairs were approaching a crisis in my case against the smugglers, and I felt that upon my return from this trip I might need your service—and then, as I explained before, I am very fond of boys.”
Mr. Gray decided not to see or speak to the captured smugglers.
“Let them still think of me as Mr. Lawrence, and that I have been captured and taken away,” he said, and Lieutenant Winters agreed.
Stanwood Gray left the lodge again that night, leaving the boys in full charge. Following, shortly, went Lieutenant Winters in the “Lucia,” with the smuggler captives.
“I don’t know when I shall return,” said Mr. Gray, just before his departure, “but until I do the lodge is in your care. If you run short of provisions, Hoki knows where to get more, and you can have them charged to me. Should you be forced to leave before I get back, lock the lodge, leave the key at this address, and send me a wire at this one. It will be forwarded to me wherever I may be. Now, enjoy yourselves, and be comforted by the thought that you will be disturbed no more by midnight prowlers—at least, none of the smuggler variety.”
CHAPTER XXIV—IN MORTONVILLE AGAIN
The next few days were ones of great enjoyment for the young canoeists. Their fondest dreams of life among the Thousand Islands were realized; for bathing, boating, fishing, and occasionally some scrub games of baseball, with access to the really fine library of the lodge, served to occupy their time.
Hoki still acted in the capacity of cook, preferring to serve the boys in this way as long as they should remain at the lodge. The matter of Mr. Gray’s double identity had been explained to the Jap, and he had at last reversed his opinion of his former master; he now stood in fear of him no longer. Mr. Gray’s deception of Hoki had only been a part of his well-devised plan to lose his real identity completely.
One day in the early part of August Stanwood Gray arrived in his motor-boat, his face wreathed in smiles. He had succeeded in winding up the case of the smugglers, he said, and the matter was now at rest until their trial came up at the fall term of court.
“I am going to put in three weeks of solid rest,” he said, “before going to another part of the country to look into an affair of an entirely different nature. I have been a long time on the case of the smugglers, but the final result entirely justified my judgment in the matter. You boys were of great assistance, and I am glad to be able to present you each with a little token of the government’s appreciation.”