The fact that each boat was so heavily laden added to the danger of their swamping if once they turned sideways to the seas, or broached to; but the boys were conscious of this ever-impending peril, and fought tooth and nail to prevent it.
Wildcat Island was quite a large piece of ground, standing in the lake at some little distance from either shore, but much nearer the western one, that upon which the town of Newtonport was situated, with its distant range of hills, called the Sunset Mountains by the natives.
This island lay not far from the foot of the lake, while another, going by the name of Snake Island, was situated close to the lumber camp at the head of the body of water, which was some ten miles long by between one and two wide.
With a strong south wind blowing, a heavy sea could be kicked up, though naturally this would be found much worse the farther up the lake one went.
“Ten minutes more will see us there, boys!” shouted Frank.
He feared that one of the other paddlers might be getting pretty near his last effort, and wished to encourage the balance of his chums to renewed efforts.
“We’re all right; don’t worry about us,” called back Bluff, who happened to be a little bit ahead.
He had hardly spoken than he came close to the verge of disaster. To make his voice carry the better, Bluff had half turned his head, and in doing this lost his advantage just a trifle. So it came that the next sea struck the Red Rover on the forward port side, instead of head on. This caused the frail canoe to sheer out of her course, amid frantic efforts of her wearied skipper to regain a straightaway heading; and only for the fact that a second sea did not follow closely on the heels of the first, he might have met with an upset.
Presently they ran into the lee of the island, where the water was smoother.
This revived the flagging energies of Bluff and Jerry, always rivaling each other in whatever they attempted; so they set up a little race for the shore.
“Who won, Frank?” demanded Bluff between gasps, as all of them landed.
“Well,” remarked the other, with a sly wink at Will, which at the time the latter did not fully understand, though its import was made plain later, “I’d declare it a dead heat! You two fellows are so evenly matched it’s hard to decide which is the better.”
“All but our lung capacity; there I’ve got him beaten every time,” insisted Bluff.
“You have, eh? Wait until the opportunity comes, and you’ll just see how easy I put you on the mat. Ashore it is, my hearties! We’re castaway sailors for a week!” exclaimed Jerry, suiting the action to the word, and dragging his canoe up on the little shelving beach, beyond which lay the bristling thickets, hiding all the mysteries of Wildcat Island.
“Monarch of all we survey. Here we hide from the world, and forget dull care,” sang Will, prancing about to ease up his strained muscles.
“Here, lend a helping hand, you shirk!” called Frank, who was dragging the big canoe ashore alone.
Suddenly there was a shriek from Will that made the others spring up. Frank’s hand involuntarily reached out for the double-barreled shotgun that lay in its waterproof case on top of the stuff in his canoe.
“Look! look! the wild man!” shouted Jerry.
They all saw a hideous face framed among the branches and twigs of the thicket close by. One second only was it in view, hardly long enough for them to make out that it was human rather than that of an immense ape. Then the ugly face vanished from their sight, leaving the four canoeists gaping at each other as though unable to positively decide whether they had really seen the mysterious wild man of the island, or something which their imaginations had conjured up instead.
CHAPTER V – A STRANGE HAPPENING
“Did you see him, boys?” exclaimed Will, who was shivering as if he had just run across a ghost.
“Why, to be sure,” replied Frank, laughing a little forcedly; for the sight of that hideous face had given him a shock.
“Then it was so, after all. I began to believe I was just imagining things. Oh! what a magnificent opportunity I missed. How can I ever forgive myself?” groaned Will, showing signs of disgust.
“Opportunity for what – capturing the terrible wild man?” cried Bluff, aghast at what seemed the audacity of his ordinarily peaceable chum.
“Certainly not. But if I had only been ready I could have taken his picture to show the folks at home. My stars! what a great feat that would have been,” sighed the disappointed photographer, shaking his head.
“Tell me about that, will you? There was my uncle laughing at me when I mentioned about this same wild man of the island. He declared it was only some innocent animal, or else an old woman’s tale. But every one of us saw him, and we’ve not been ashore five minutes, either,” declared Jerry.
“I foresee some stirring times for us here, what with the snakes, if they are to be found, the ferocious wildcats they tell about, and now this mysterious wild man,” remarked Frank, soberly, as he began to take the bundles out of his canoe and place them high and dry up on the shore.
“Are we going to stay?” asked Bluff.
“Why, to be sure we are. Talk to me about your brave men, I like to hear a fellow speak about being scared away by the first sight of some poor, harmless chap. Perhaps it’s another of Mr. Smithson’s crazy people, escaped from the asylum over at Merrick, and hiding out here.”
On their camping-out trip of the preceding autumn they had met with a remarkable personage who persisted in declaring that he was the famous Prince Bismarck, and who eventually turned out to be an escaped inmate of the asylum at Merrick, some miles away.
A keeper named Smithson had engaged them to help him capture the demented one, and this was what Jerry was referring to when he spoke.
“I wouldn’t wonder but what that may be true,” remarked Frank, seriously; “but no matter, we are not the kind to run at a shadow. We laid out this trip to spend our Easter holidays on Wildcat Island, and it’s got to be something pretty threatening that will frighten us off.”
“Hear! hear!” exclaimed Jerry.
“That’s the stuff!” declared Bluff, thinking that he could not afford to let his rival take all the credit for valor.
“But I’ll never get another opportunity to take his picture,” complained Will.
“How do you know? Man alive, there may be no end of stirring times coming, with that same old hermit figuring in the circus. Perhaps the scent of our coffee and bacon will bring him back into touch with civilization; why, he may even walk into our camp, and try to make friends, when he gets a whiff of onions frying,” and Frank slapped his chum on the back as he spoke along this line.
“Oh! well, if you think that way I’ll keep up my hopes. And you just remember that if I seem to be hugging this little snapshot contrivance closer than usual, why, I’m only keeping in readiness for instantaneous work. A fellow has to be pretty quick on the trigger to get a picture of a wild man, you know.”
They soon had the boats unloaded.
“Pull them out, fellows. I’ve brought along the chains and padlocks belonging to each boat. Having a canoe stolen isn’t such fun, even on a ten-mile lake like Camalot,” ventured Frank, as he produced the articles in question, and proceeded to fasten the canoes together, at the same time making sure they were chained to the sturdy root of a nearby tree.
“He thinks of everything,” admitted Will, in admiration.
“Don’t you believe it for one second. I forget many things; but as they said a wild man inhabited this bit of island, I wanted to make sure he did not run off with any of our boats, and perhaps our supplies.”
“All the same, it took your long head to think of such a thing, old chap. Now, I defy any one to hook our