“What do you think?” were his first words.

“Why, what?” I asked, sitting up, and wincing from my wounded shoulder.

“Our young friend has skipped in the night!”

“‘Skipped?’” I exclaimed, with a curious ache at my heart.

“Sure enough!  Gone off on that little nigger sloop that dropped in here yesterday afternoon, I guess.”

“You don’t mean it?”

“No doubt of it—­I wonder whether you’ve had the same thought as I had.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know I always said there was a mystery about that boy?”

“Well, what of it?”

“Did you notice the way he bound your shoulder last night?”

“What of it?”

“Did you ever see a man bind a wound like that?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean simply that the mystery about our Jack Harkaway was just this:  Jack Harkaway was no boy at all—­but just a girl; a brick of a dare-devil girl!”

CHAPTER VIII

Better Than Duck.

Charlie Webster’s discovery—­if discovery it was—­of “Jack Harkaway’s” true sex seemed so far plausible in that it accounted not only for much that had seemed mysterious about him and his manner, but also (though this I did not mention to Charlie) it accounted for certain dim feelings of my own, of which, before, I had been scarcely conscious.

But we were not long left to continue our speculations, being presently interrupted by the arrival of exciting news—­news which, I need hardly say, promptly drove all thought of “Jack Harkaway” out of Charlie Webster’s head, though it was not so soon to be banished from mine.

The news came in the form of a note from Father Serapion.  He had sent it by the captain of a sponging schooner, who, in turn, had sent it by two of his men in a rowboat, not being able to venture up the creek himself owing to the northeast wind which was blowing so hard, that, as sometimes happens on that coast, he might have been left high and dry.

Father Serapion’s note simply confirmed his conjecture that it was Tobias who had bought rum at Behring’s Point, and that he was probably somewhere in the network of creeks and marl lagoons in our neighbourhood.  Telling Tom to give the men a good breakfast, Charlie thought the news over.

“I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” he said presently.  “I’m going to leave you here—­and I’m going to charter the sponger out there.  This river we are on comes out of a sound that spreads directly south—­Turner’s Sound.  Turner’s Sound has two outlets:  this, and Goose River ten miles down the shore.  Now, if Tobias is inside here, he can only get out either down here, or down Goose River.  I am going down in the sponger to the mouth of Goose River, to keep watch there; and you must stay where you are, and keep watch here.  Between the two of us, a week will starve him out.  Or, if not, I’ll chase after him up Goose River; and in that case, he’ll have to come down here—­and it will be up to you, for I don’t believe he’ll have the nerve to try walking across the marl ponds to the east coast.”