“Of course I’ve got to rescue the boys—that’s certain. I might get some of Mr. Henderson’s friends—a few of them—and make them promise to keep it a secret. Even then it would leak out, and the whole town would be out here sooner or later. We wanted to come to a wild place, and we found it. Now there’s no sense in making it civilized.

“No, I’ll work this thing out alone, and I’ll rescue the boys single-handed. I ought to be able to do it after I rescued dad and mother from that cannibal island, and got ahead of old Skeel. I defeated him twice and I can do it again, and I will!”

Now that he had come to a decision Tom felt more hopeful, and he began to go over plans in his mind. He had made and rejected half a dozen, from undermining the mill, and blowing a breach in the walls, to making believe set fire to it and getting in under cover of the confusion.

“But I don’t believe any of those schemes would do,” he mused. “I’ve got to use strategy against those fellows. They are evidently looking for an open attack, by the way the old hermit was doing sentinel duty in the window.[167] I wonder how in the world he got up there when there are no stairs in the mill?”

[167]

Tom’s brain was getting weary with so much hard thinking. He felt as if he was back in Elmwood Hall, and had to puzzle over some hard geometry proposition.

“I’m going to bed,” he decided at length. “Maybe in the morning I’ll be fresher and can think better.”

He collected a quantity of dry wood, and had it in readiness to throw on the embers of the campfire. He also took a lantern with him inside the sleeping tent, turning the wick low, and he had a gun in readiness.

“I’m not going to be taken by surprise if I can help it,” he mused. “That’s how they must have gotten Jack and the others into their power. I’ll fight if they try to get me, and they might, for with one of us loose they know there’ll be an attempt at a rescue.”

Tom made himself comfortable on his cot, but for a time he could not sleep. Then he fell into a doze, only to awaken with a start as he heard someone prowling about the camp.

“Who’s there?” he called, sitting up and reaching out for his gun. There was no answer, and Tom arose and peered from the flaps of the tent. As he did so he saw a movement near the boxes where the provisions were kept.

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