“Take a fishing-trip,” suggested young Joe.
They looked at young Joe savagely, for each knew in his own heart that it was running away from danger,—but it was significant that not a boy objected.
“We’ve been planning one for a week or more,” urged Joe, in extenuation of his plan. “And we needn’t stay long. We can come back in a day or two and then start right out again, so as not to attract attention by being gone too long.”
“I suppose a little trip down among the islands wouldn’t be so bad for our health,” said Henry Burns, dryly; but it was clear he had no great liking for the plan.
And so, in a vain endeavour to escape from what seemed to them a most unfair and cruel predicament, and without realizing that it was the worst thing they could do, the boys agreed to start early on the following morning in the Spray for a cruise.
Much surprised was Mrs. Warren when informed of their plan.
“And just as everybody is telling what brave boys you were,” she said. “They all say that half the guests would have lost their lives if it hadn’t been for you.”
This was worse than punishment, and the boys groaned inwardly, for Mrs. Warren had taught her boys to respect her, and they valued her good opinion more than anything else in the world. They went off to bed soon after supper, “so as to get an early start in the morning,” they said.
It was early that same evening, while the boys were at tea, that Squire Brackett stepped ashore from his sailboat in a perfect fever of excitement.
“I knew it and I said it,” he muttered to himself, slapping one hard fist into the palm of the other hand. “When I saw that blaze across the water this morning, and knew that it couldn’t be anything else than the hotel, I says to myself, ‘Those boys have done it, with some of their monkey-shines,’ and that’s just the way of it. By Jingo! but won’t Colonel Witham jump out of his skin when I tell him what I saw through that window.