Turning squarely in toward the shore, Harvey and Joe Hinman soon reached it, jumped out, and drew the canoe far up on the beach. Their next move surprised the crew of the Spray. Leaving the canoe in full sight on the beach, Harvey and Joe Hinman walked deliberately away, without so much as looking back at their pursuers.
“That’s a mighty strange performance,” exclaimed George Warren. “I don’t understand that at all.”
There was no place to run the Spray in close to shore, so they rounded to some thirty feet out, and Tom and Bob, hastily throwing off their clothes, dived overboard and swam to the beach.
Tom was the first to reach the canoe; but, as he came upon it and turned it over, he uttered a cry of astonishment.
“They’ve fooled us this time, sure enough,” he said to Bob, who came panting up. “It isn’t our canoe.”
The canoe, in fact, was new.
It was enough like theirs to be its mate, both as to size and colour, but there was not a scratch upon it nor upon the paddles. The canoe could not have been used more than once or twice since it had left the maker’s hands.
“The joke is on us,” cried Bob to the boys in the Spray. “It’s another canoe. Harvey’s ‘governor,’ as he calls him, must have bought it for him and sent it down on the boat yesterday. He doesn’t seem to be afraid to trust us with his property, which is more than we would do with him.”
“Perhaps he would rather trust the canoe with us than to trust himself with all of us just at this time,” replied Tom. “I feel like taking it along with us, to make him give up our tent, but I’m afraid that wouldn’t do. We can’t prove that he has it, either.”
Harvey and Joe Hinman had clearly left the canoe to its fate, so there was nothing to do but to swim aboard the Spray again, and the voyage down the island was resumed.