The Boy Scouts on Picket Duty | Page 6

youthful companions were happy, enjoying the cruise and their adventures.
So unpromising did the weather beyond the keys look, and so congenial seemed the lagoon and this sheltered islet, the captain came to the conclusion that it would not be amiss if they should linger there a day or two longer than they had planned. After all, Alec's father had set no time limit for the cruise and the boys were in no hurry to return to Santario.
Thinking thus, he rejoined his crew around the fire and heard them discussing a plan to take the dory and row out on the lagoon in the morning, if it were not too rough, in the hope of catching some fresh fish for breakfast. He assented to this plan, for he himself intended to go aboard the Arrow the first thing on the morrow to look her over and see how she had weathered the night. Wrapping himself in a blanket and bidding the boys follow his example, he lay down beside the embers and was soon asleep.
Hugh and Billy, lovers of surf-bathing, would fain have taken a dip into the breakers before going to sleep; but Alec sensibly counseled them against this.
"Wait till daylight If you shed your clothes now and go in, the mosquitoes will eat you alive before you're dry again," he warned them. "Besides, it's dangerous to go in around these shores in the darkness. You might stumble into a hole or a sea-puss and be carried out to sea before you knew what had happened. And Dave told me there are sharks that-----"
"Oh, forget it!" laughed Billy. "We have no intention of furnishing supper to a shark. Anyway, real, live, man-eating sharks are as scarce as hens' teeth---almost."
Nevertheless, being overruled by Hugh, who saw the wisdom of Alec's advice, he promptly abandoned the desire for a plunge; and, as he soon learned, they did well to seek the protection of their smoke smudge, for the mosquitoes were truly formidable. Even under the canopy of smoke, these noxious insects darted viciously to bite and torment the campers. Time and time again, the boys were awakened from sleep by the attacks of these buzzing pests; but at last they grew more accustomed to such onslaughts, and pulling nets closely around their limbs and faces, they sank into deeper slumber.
* * * * * *
"The evening red, the morning gray Sets the traveler on his way. The evening gray, the morning red Brings showers down upon his head."
Hugh whispered these words softly to himself when he awoke in the dim twilight hour just before dawn. It was still too dark for him to distinguish objects clearly, and for a moment he felt that queer sensation of being lost, of not knowing just where he was---that feeling which sometimes comes to one even in the most familiar surroundings. At once, however, it left him, and the little rhyme crept into his mind instead.
"Wonder why I waked up so suddenly?" was his silent query as he lay there blinking up at the sky, watching the few visible stars grow pale and paler. "Thought I heard some noise like distant thunder, very far away, and then it changed into the sound of muffled oars, or the tchug-chug-tchug of a motor boat. Then a voice said softly, 'It's a fine morn---' Oh, pshaw! Must have been dreaming. Is anybody else awake?"
He sat up and peered through the dusk. No, his companions were still asleep, prone on the sand. The breeze had lessened and the nocturnal insects had begun to take flight into the shadowy undergrowth, retreating before the advance of day. Across the dark stretch of water between this island and the mainland a flock of waterfowl flew noiselessly and vanished over the dunes. The surf broke with monotonous, soothing rhythm, stirring the silence with little waves of sound.
"It must have been the surf I heard," Hugh thought, still trying to decide what had roused him from sleep.
Quietly rising, so as not to disturb his friends, he stole down to the beach and stood gazing at the sloop, which now rode calmly at anchor, her bow light still shining.
"And yet it did sound like a motor boat," he said aloud.
The sound of his own voice, breaking the stillness, almost startled him. With a short, low laugh at his habit of talking aloud when alone, he turned his back on camp and walked on for some little distance up the beach, until he rounded a curve of the shore and saw before him a narrow channel separating the island on which he stood from another, slightly larger. Clumps of young palms grew on that other island, taller and greener than those around the camping place. Hugh had been told that a palmetto bud cut out of a