“Caught half a dozen fish today and named this place Friday island because of the day, or night, I was brought here and my subsequent Robinson Crusoe experiences,” began the entry for Monday.

Then followed a gleeful memorandum of his apparent success in interesting Cub Perry with an account of his predicament, in spite of the efforts of his radio nemesis to prove him a trifler with the truth.  Tuesday’s entry closed with a notation of the announcement from Cub that the Catwhisker was about to start on a rescue trip from Oswego to the Lake of the Thousand Islands and would endeavor to find him by radio compass.

“The situation is cleared up very much,” Mr. Perry remarked after Hal had finished reading the diary.  “The chief problem now remaining to be solved is, what became of your cousin?”

“In other words, that’s the mystery before us,” said Bud, with a twinkle of fun in his eyes.

“Call it what you will,” smiled Mr. Perry.  “But it doesn’t strike me as in the least mysterious.  Evidently he was taken away from this island by the fellows who put him here.”

“And what did they do with him?” was the query with which Cub supplemented his father’s observation.

“That, of course, we don’t know,” the latter replied.  “They may have taken him over to the Canadian shore and released him for reasons of their own.”

“Then it’s up to us to find out,” Cub inferred.

“Surely.  We’ve had remarkable success thus far.  It would be a pity for us to meet with failure.  That would spoil our story.”

“Story!” exclaimed Bud.  “What story?”

“Our story—­the one we’ve been enacting thus far.  Look back over our experiences in the last two days and see if you can make anything but a very fascinating yarn out of them.”

“It’s a radio-college story, isn’t it?” Hal suggested.

“Yes,” Mr. Perry agreed; “that would be one good way to put it.”

“If it didn’t involve my cousin in a critical situation, I’d hope the story wouldn’t end yet,” said Hal.  “I’d like to see it run thirty or forty chapters.”

“How many chapters do you figure it would make thus far?” asked the director-general of the expedition with a look of keen interest.

“Oh, about ten or fifteen,” Hal replied.

“Then, to suit your taste, it ought to be only about half finished.”

“Yes, but for my cousin’s sake, I wish it were finished right now and Alvin were safe with us or at home.”

“But wishes won’t produce results nor cut off chapters,” Cub philosophised.

“No, the denouement will work itself out along natural lines under natural laws,” Mr. Perry predicted.

“I don’t think this story is going to amount to anything as a yarn,” Cub announced with a look of superior wisdom.

“Why not?” asked his father.

“Because there’s no villain in it.  I never did like a story with a tame ending, and the worst kind of a story on earth is one that starts with a thrill and ends with a nap in a sunparlor.”