“Mr. Tuckerman calls it a sporting chance,” said Ben. “I said to him just about what you’ve said to me now; but he grinned and told me he never gave up conundrums.”
David dropped back into his former comfortable position, his hands clasped under his head and his cap pulled down over his nose, so as to shield that sensitive feature from burning a more fiery red than it was already. “So Tom and the Professor are prowling around the old house this morning?” he said reflectively. “Well, they’re not apt to run into any ghosts at this time of day.”
Ben, absorbed in his fishing, continued his careful handling of his line until half-a-dozen flounders were deposited in the boat. Then he stowed away his tackle, stretched his arms, and looked around. “Now, Dave, you old duffer, I’m going to take a cruise about our island home. There’s nothing like knowing all the ins and outs of the place where you’re living. Do you think you’re strong enough to handle the tiller, or would you rather dangle your feet over the bow?”
David sat up with a grunt. “Don’t you get sarcastic, young feller. I can sail this dory with one hand behind my back.” And shortly he had the Argo headed up into the wind, keeping well out from shore so as to avoid the occasional spits of rock that ornamented the coast.
They started to make the circuit. Cotterell’s Island, so far as they could judge from the water, was very much like all the other islands that lay out from Barmouth, thickly wooded for the most part, with alternating beaches and headlands, and here and there a cliff, with little rock-bound basins at the foot. On the eastward side, however, there was an opening, where the tide ran inland for some distance, a fair sort of harbor except when the wind should blow from that quarter. “There,” said Ben, “there’s a snug landlocked channel. If I’d been one of the Cotterells and wanted to keep a boat hidden that’s the place I’d have picked out.”
“You’re making the Professor’s ancestors sound like pirates or smugglers,” objected David. “What do you think they did that they wanted to keep so dark?”
“That little inlet can’t be so far from the back of the house either,” Ben went on, paying no attention to his companion’s question. “Yes, that would be the place to steal away when the neighbors came to call.”
“I’ll take a look up there,” declared David, who was beginning to feel that Ben was giving himself airs. “I guess I can find my way up that inlet as well as any of your blessed Cotterells could.” And suiting the act to the word, he brought the Argo about and kept her bow a little to the north of west until she had cleared a seaweed-covered reef that was high up out of the water at ebb-tide.
Ben said not a word, but picked up a boathook, in case it should be necessary to fend off the dory at some turn of the shore. But David knew his business. Up the winding channel he made his way until the Argo’s bottom gently ran on to gravel at the head of the stream.
“Yes, I was right,” said Ben. “There’s the roof of the house on the other side of those trees.” A leap, and he landed on shore, the dory careening on one side from the force of his jump.