“Well, we don’t want anything that doesn’t belong to us,” was Bud’s reassuring answer; “and if this island is yours, we surely don’t want to stay here.  But we thought that maybe you’d be glad to sell, for a member of our party said he’d like to buy all of the islands of this group if he could find the owner.”

“Who is he?” asked the quartet’s spokesman.

“His name is Perry and he lives at Oswego, New York,” Bud replied.

“Well, you all go somewheres else to talk that matter over and then take it up with my real estate agent.  Meanwhile I don’t allow no trespassers on this ground.”

“But we can’t go until our friends come back with their boat,” said Hal.  “They promised to return soon.”

“Where did they go?”

“To the Canadian Coast.”

“What fer?”

“To get another friend who will join us.”

“Well, they’d better hurry up or they won’t find you when they get back.”

“What’s that you got there?” asked the man who had been addressed as “Spike”, indicating the radio table and outfit thereon.

“That’s a wireless outfit, you goof,” replied the tall, angular spokesman.

“I tell you what we’ll do,” Hal announced, taking inspiration from the attention thus called to his radio apparatus.  “We’ll call our friends by wireless and have them return at once and take us away.  How’s that?”

“All right,” was the assenting response.  “Go ahead, but be careful, no tricks, or our revenge will be speedy, and that’s no name fer it.”

With this warning the four men walked away and Hall got busy with a diligence inspired by a sense of danger and, at the same time, a sense of the opportunity afforded by the possibilities of the world’s latest great invention, radio.

CHAPTER XIX

“S O S” from Friday Island

Max Handy, the Canadian youth at Rockport, who gave the crew of the Catwhisker, by wireless, directions whereby the latter were able to locate “mathematically” the whereabouts of the “Canadian Crusoe’s Friday Island” listened in much of the time thereafter, in the hope of being able to keep in touch with developments to the end of this interesting radio affair.

And this hope was realized in a degree that could hardly have been expected with moderation.  But he was well equipped, and, being mechanically inclined, and industrious, he was able to get a maximum of results with his sending and receiving outfit.

He had traced the rescue yacht all the way from Oswego to Friday Island, and the last message he had picked up from the three young radio Americans was the one that completed the agreement under which the yacht was to proceed to Rockport next day and meet the father of the “missing Crusoe”.  Then he attempted to get in communication with the island operator, but Mr. Perry had just announced that the next number on the program would be “everybody to bed at once”, and there was no more listening-in before the next morning.