CHAPTER XI

THE CREW TAKES A TUMBLE

When Alex and Case reached the deck of the _Rambler_, they found Clay and Jule leaning against the gunwale laughing hard enough to split their sides. A searchlight in the latter's hand revealed Captain Joe and Teddy standing by the cabin door, looking around as if inquiring what it all meant.

"Well," Alex said, producing his own searchlight, "if there's anything funny going on here, you'd better be passing it round."

"Where have you been?" demanded Clay the next moment.

"Been?" repeated Alex. "We've been up in the air!"

"That's no fairy tale, either," Case cut in. "We've been arrested, and released, and attacked, and pommeled, and now we strike some kind of a minstrel show. What's been going on?"

"You've been arrested, have you?" laughed Jule, paying no attention to the question. "Any old time you go away from this boat and don't get into trouble, I'll wire the news back to Chicago. What did you get pinched for, and how did you get away?"

"We got pinched because of Max," replied Alex, "and we got out of it because we came upon a white policeman. We escaped from Max's cronies because Captain Joe butted in and chewed up a few. That's some dog, that is."

"And he came back here and helped you out, too, it seems," Case said. "I should think he was some dog!"

"And Teddy helped, too," Clay laughed. "We had a show here for a little while that was worth the price of admission."

"It didn't look funny to me," Jule protested. "I was scared stiff most of the time."

After Alex and Case had replaced a broken globe on the prow light, told the story of their adventures, and explained that the chief of police had requested the privilege of looking over the boat in the morning, the boys moved the _Rambler_ to a slip farther down the river and went to bed, Jule remaining on watch for the remainder of the night. The day had been a busy one and they were all tired.

Alex was out first in the morning, poking along the water front in the canoe which Max had deserted. After a time Clay came out of the cabin of the _Rambler_ and called to him.

"Got a fish, Alex?"

Alex shook his head.

"The fish won't bite my hook this morning!" he shouted back.

"Well," Clay returned, "there's a gudgeon up on shore that evidently wants to get hold of your hook, and you with it."

Alex turned quickly and looked up the slip at the foot of which the canoe lay. He was just in time to see Max and another boy about his size disappearing behind a collection of goods' boxes.

"Why didn't you shoot him?" Alex called out to Clay. "You saw him first. He ought to be shot for what he did last night."

Captain Joe now came out on the deck, yawning and stretching, and elevated his fore feet to the gunwale of the boat. Clay patted him on the head and pointed to the goods' boxes behind which Max had disappeared.

"Do you think, Captain Joe," he said to the dog, "that you could go and get a wharf rat this morning? I think there's one behind that pile of boxes. You better go and see, anyway."

Of course the dog did not understand all that was said to him--although the boys sometimes insisted that he did--but he did know what the pointing finger meant. He was over the gunwale in an instant, tearing up the side of the slip, barking and growling as he went.

"You'll get that dog killed yet," Alex called out to Clay. "That wharf rat of a Max is just like a snake. You don't want to get near him unless you step squarely on his head."

Both boys whistled return orders to the dog, but he would not come back. He seemed to remember that an old enemy was near at hand and turned the corner of the heap of boxes with a vicious snarl.

The next moment, Max appeared at the top of the heap, fending off the dog with a board he had ripped from a box.

"Call off your dog!" he shouted. "I want to get my canoe. You get out of it, kid, and leave it tied to the slip."

"If you live long enough to see me give you this canoe," Alex laughed, "you'll be older than Noah before you die, and have whiskers forty feet long."

"I'll set the police on you!" threatened Max.

"You tried that last night," grinned Alex.

"Come on down here," urged Clay. "I'd like to know what kind of a penitentiary you received your early education in."

"You'd like to have me come down there, wouldn't you?" sneered Max. "You think you've got the police on your side, don't you? But I know a couple of detectives that will fix you, all right. You needn't think I'm going to let you run away with my canoe."

"How'd you get up the river so quickly?" asked Clay. "Did you dive in east of the peninsula and swim under water to Quebec?"

"Oh, I got up on a steamer, all right," was the reply, "and I've been here waiting for you ever since."

"Do you happen to have a sore head this morning?" taunted Alex. "You must have got a bump or two last night."

"You'll get two for every one I got," Max shouted, angrily. "Are you going to give me that canoe? I'm going to have it, you know."

Alex deliberately paddled the canoe over to the _Rambler_, secured it with a light line, climbed to the deck, and set the motors in motion. Max yelled out a few threatening sentences and disappeared.

"We may as well be going up to the old pier," he said, "for this dandy chief of police I discovered last night will be down to see us before long. He's a right good fellow, that chief is."

"You better hold up a minute," Jule announced,

"Captain Joe is still behind those boxes. If Max could capture him, he'd have him in all the dog fights in Quebec."

But Max was at this time taking to his heels up the street which ran down to the slip; and Captain Joe soon made his appearance, looking very much discouraged. He was taken on board, dripping with water, and Teddy received quite a bath by approaching him too suddenly. The bulldog enjoyed that.

The chief of police made his appearance soon after the boys had partaken of breakfast, and sat down to talk over the events of the preceding night.

"This boy, Max," he explained, "is one of the queerest customers we have anything to do with. He lives in the streets, apparently without money or friends, and yet he frequently appears at a swell hotel handsomely dressed and with plenty of money in his pockets. He seems to have been well educated, as you have probably noticed from his conversation."

"He talks like a graduate," admitted Clay.

"Yes, and he's one of the sharpest little chaps in the city. We are certain that he has had a hand in several bold robberies, yet it has up to this time been impossible to convict him. He is usually defended by first-class criminal lawyers, and his wharf rat companions seem to be very desirable witnesses for him."

"Isn't it possible," asked Clay, "that the boy lives along the river front for some well defined, perhaps criminal, purpose of his own?"

"I've often thought of that," answered the chief, "for he always takes great pains to make friends of the creatures of the underworld. Now and then he disappears from the city for a few days, or weeks, but always comes back to his old haunts."

"Of course," Clay said, "you are familiar with the Fontenelle land claim and the story of the lost charter and the missing family jewels?"

"Oh, yes," answered the chief, smiling tolerantly, "every man, woman and child in Quebec knows all about the Fontenelle case. Old man Fontenelle is almost a monomaniac on the subject of the lost charter. He has spent thousands of dollars searching for it and claims that he would have discovered it long ago only for the active and criminal opposition of men who might lose heavily if it came again into his possession."

"And the story of the lost channel?" asked Clay.

"There is a queer story of a lost channel," the chief laughed, "but I'm afraid that it will always be a lost channel."

"But Fontenelle is continually trying to locate it," suggested Clay.

"Yes, but he has no more idea where to look for it than a child in a cradle. There is a place down the river where he thinks it might once have existed, but he has no clews of any kind."

"Hasn't even a map?" asked Clay, resolved to know exactly, as far as possible, what knowledge the Fontenelles had of the lost channel.

"No, not even a map," answered the chief. "I tell you that the family has absolutely nothing to go by. Young Fontenelle, who is making most of the searches now, only goes out to please his father and to give his friends a pleasant summer vacation."

And so the crude map which had been so mysteriously delivered to the boys was an entirely new element in the case! Who had drawn it, who had connived at its delivery, who had supplied the information buried in the legends of more than three hundred years!

Clay puzzled over the matter while the chief chatted with the other boys, but could reach no conclusion. Again he was tempted to reveal to an outsider the existence of the map, and again he forced himself to silence when the words were almost on his lips.

"I shall be laughed at if I say anything about the map," he mused. "The chief will tell me that many a joke has been played on the Fontenelles, and that this was intended to be another. He will tell me that the _Rambler_ was mistaken for the _Cartier_, and that there is no mystery, but only fraud, connected with either one of the messages we received that night."

"You spoke of the Fontenelle claim in connection with the strange conduct of this boy Max," the chief finally said to Clay. "Why did you do that? Can you see any possible connection between the two?"

Then Clay told of the boy's appearance on the _Rambler_, referring also to the fact that he had been accompanied, apparently, by men who sought to seize the _Rambler_ after it had been beached.

"And Fontenelle claims that these men were not river pirates at all," Clay went on, "but says they are ruffians sent out to prevent his making a thorough search of the district where his father believes the lost channel to have been. In that case, this boy Max might in some way be connected with the enemies of the Fontenelles."

"That is very true," answered the chief, "and I'll keep my eye on him after this, although I don't take much stock in this lost charter business, at all."

After a pleasant hour the chief shook hands with the boys and departed. Then the _Rambler_ was headed upstream again. The boys had had enough of Quebec during that one night.

Thirty miles or more up the St. Lawrence from Quebec, the Jacques Cartier river enters the St. Lawrence from the north. The boys sighted the mouth of the stream just before twelve o'clock. At the same moment they saw a river steamer coming down toward them. The steamer was large for one plying above Quebec, and, fearing that the wash from her propeller would make trouble for the _Rambler_, they edged over to the mouth of the entering stream, in front of which lay a great, partly submerged sand bar.

The steamer came down, whistling and ringing, and the boys signaled for her to pass off to the right. Apparently scornful of so small a craft, the pilot kept her headed directly down stream in a course which would have brought about a collision with the motor boat.

The boys swung away toward the sand bar, trusting to good luck to keep them clear of it.

Just as she came opposite the bar, the helmsman of the steamer did what he should have done before, turned the prow sharply to the south. A wall of water from the stern of the boat came sweeping down upon the _Rambler_.

It caught her broadside, and in an instant she was beached high and dry on the bar, lying with her keel exposed and the furniture and fixtures in the cabin and store rooms rattling about like hailstones in a blizzard.

Tumbling heels over head, catching at the gunwale, scrambling away so as to be beyond reach of the boat if she should go over farther, the four boys, the bulldog and the bear brought up on the hot, dry sand.

Alex sat up, brushed the sand from his eyes, felt tenderly of a peeled nose, and shook his fist at the departing steamer.

"You might come back here and pull us off," he shouted.

The people on the steamer gathered at the rail for a moment to laugh and joke at the plight in which they had left the boys, and then evidently forgot all about it.

"Now, what do you think of that?" cried Jule. "We're thrown out of water for the first time in the history of the _Rambler_. Do you suppose she's busted up much, Clay?"

"Aw, you couldn't bust her up with a cannon," shouted Alex. "We've probably lost some provisions, but this river will feed us all right."

As for Teddy and Captain Joe, they turned astonished eyes at the boat which they had never seen in exactly that position before and started to clamber back on board. Teddy shambled clumsily up on deck, but Captain Joe, evidently changing his mind, returned to the hot sand and lay down.

In a moment a great crash came from on board the motor boat. Then Teddy came rolling down the incline of the deck hugging close to his breast with two capable paws, and taking many a bump in order that he might save his burden, a two quart can of strained honey.

"That stream," Alex said, "will be just about large enough to clean up the bear after he has finished with that stolen honey."

"That ain't no stream," said Jule, "That's the lost channel."

Teddy ran away to a distant part of the bar to eat his honey in peace, and the boys ruefully watched the river in hope of rescue.