The steamer was due the next day but one.  Tish was in favor of not waiting, but of at once going in the motor boat to the town, some thirty miles away, and telling of our capture; but Hutchins claimed there was not sufficient gasoline for such an excursion.  That afternoon we went in the motor launch to where Tish had hidden the green canoe and, with a hatchet, rendered it useless.

The workings of the subconscious mind are marvelous.  In the midst of chopping, Tish suddenly looked up.

“Have you noticed,” she said, “that the detective is always watching our camp?”

“That’s all he has to do,” Aggie suggested.

“Stuff and nonsense!  Didn’t he follow you into the swamp?  Does Hutchins ever go out in the canoe that he doesn’t go out also?  I’ll tell you what has happened:  She’s young and pretty, and he’s fallen in love with her.”

I must say it sounded reasonable.  He never bothered about the motor boat, but the instant she took the canoe and started out he was hovering somewhere near.

“She’s noticed it,” Tish went on.  “That’s what she was quarreling about with him yesterday.”

“How are we to know,” said Aggie, who was gathering up the scraps of the green canoe and building a fire under them—­“how are we to know they are not old friends, meeting thus in the wilderness?  Fate plays strange tricks, Tish.  I lived in the same street with Mr. Wiggins for years, and never knew him until one day when my umbrella turned wrong side out in a gust of wind.”

“Fate fiddlesticks!” said Tish.  “There’s no such thing as fate in affairs of this sort.  It’s all instinct—­the instinct of the race to continue itself.”

This Aggie regarded as indelicate and she was rather cool to Tish the balance of the day.

Our prisoner spent most of the day at the end of the island toward us, sitting quietly, as we could sec through the glasses.  We watched carefully, fearing at any time to see the Indian paddling toward him.

[Tish was undecided what to do in such an emergency, except to intercept him and explain, threatening him also with having attempted to carry the incriminating papers.  As it happened, however, the entire camp had gone for a two-days’ deer hunt, and before they returned the whole thing had come to its surprising end.]

Late in the afternoon Tish put her theory of the red-haired man to the test.

“Hutchins,” she said, “Miss Lizzie and I will cook the dinner if you want to go in the canoe to Harvey’s Bay for water-lilies.”

Hutchins at once said she did not care a rap for water-lilies; but, seeing a determined glint in Tish’s eye, she added that she would go for frogs if Tish wanted her out of the way.

“Don’t talk like a child!” Tish retorted.  “Who said I wanted you out of the way?”

It is absolutely true that the moment Hutchins put her foot into the canoe the red-haired man put down his fishing-rod and rose.  And she had not taken three strokes with the paddle before he was in the blue canoe.