He was up again before dawn. “Tell you what!” he exclaimed over a cup of coffee. “I’m going to find out who those fellows are.”
“The men with that queer plane?” Stew asked.
“Yes. We’ve got to know. They might help us get back to our ship.”
“And then again they might not—they might do just the opposite,” Stew suggested.
“That’s a chance we’ll have to take. You’d better stay here and sort of look after things,” he suggested. “I may discover something big. We might want to get off this island in a hurry.”
“Get off?” Stew stared. “Yes, but how?”
“There’s the Jap raft, you know. It’s seaworthy. We’ve got supplies of a sort, enough to last us weeks with the birds and fish we’d catch. If it seemed the thing to do, we could slip the raft out into the current and get away rather rapidly.”
“I suppose so,” Stew agreed.
Jack stood up. Should he tell Stew of the night visitor? After a moment’s thought he decided against that.
A half hour later, after hurrying over the native trail, he found himself slipping silently through the brush toward the camp of the strangers. “I’ll just look before I show myself,” he whispered to the empty air.