They slept peacefully, thoroughly wearied by hard work and worn down by the nerve tension of the last few days.
It was Sam who shook them awake.
“That man, Coleson, wasn’t so grateful, after all,” he said when the chums had rubbed some sleep out of their eyes in the early dawn. “The tender is gone. The two white men—gone too!”
“The ungrateful—” began Nicky. But what would calling names do for them? Certainly it wouldn’t help any.
“We are not on an island, and we’ve got food,” Nicky observed, recovering his usual trust in the eventual justice of life. “But we are marooned! And yet—and yet, I’ll say it again—we’ll come out best in the long run. You wait and see!”
CHAPTER XXIV
“A NEEDLE IN A HAYSTACK”
To say that Clarence Neale, the leader at the start of the Mystery Boys’ adventure, was worried would be a tame statement of the truth. Clarence Neale was more than that. He felt that without intending to do so he had shirked a responsibility.
Mr. Gray, the scholar and writer, had entrusted Cliff to his care on an adventure that promised to be merely a cruise; Nicky Lane, and Tom, had come under his protection without permission from their relatives; and not one of them was with him, nor was their whereabouts known to him.
No wonder the young archaeologist, himself not too far from boyhood to recall what dangers its headstrong impulses lead to, dreaded many dire things.
Two things he knew definitely. The boys were not on Crocodile Key, nor did any boatman or native in Little Card Sound or on its shores know a thing about them. The second point he was sure about was that they were not on Sam’s sloop. He had overhauled that in the government cutter and made sure.