"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 pa.s.s 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 b.u.mp 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.

CHAPTER XII

RIVERMEN WITH A THIRST

"A lost channel and a lost boat! Still if we didn't have adventures just like this, we'd be contented to remain on the South Branch in Chicago," said Case. "It wouldn't have been any fun if we had pa.s.sed up the St. Lawrence without getting dumped on the sand."

"Say, kid," Jule said, pointing to Alex, "do you think you can swim over to the sh.o.r.e?"

"Swim over yourself!" advised Alex. "What do you want me to swim over for?"

"To get timber to block up this boat so you can cook dinner," laughed Jule. "We can't live on the sand which is here--that's a pun, eh?"

"What have we got for dinner?" Clay asked, ignoring the pun. "Perhaps I'd better go aboard and look over our larder."

"If you want to know where I'm going to get my dinner," Alex observed, "just look down into the river. Those fish look pretty good to me, and I'm hungry enough to eat a whale."

"If the time ever comes when you're not hungry," Case cut in, "the sun will rise in the west. You're empty to your heels."

"And I'm glad of it, too," Alex shouted back. "But what I want to know," he continued, "is how we're ever going to get off this bar."

"If we stay right here," Case advised, "some boat will come along and pull us off. You don't have to do anything unless you want to."

But at that moment there were no boats in sight. Instead, a great raft of hewn timbers with a rough shanty in the middle of it came drifting down. Half a dozen river men ran to the edge of the float and eyed the _Rambler_ keenly. They seemed amused at what had happened.

"Ship ahoy!" one of them called.

"Give us a rope," Jule shouted.

"Got anything on board?" the man called back.

"What do you mean by anything?" Jule asked.

"Oh, anything under a cork!" answered the other.

"Row over here with a couple of cases and we'll pay you for them,"

said another voice.

"What do you take this for, a floating saloon?" asked Alex.

"That's what!" came back over the water. "If you don't send over something, we'll come and get it."

"Now that's a nice proposition," Case said to Clay. "Here we get turned almost bottom-side up on a sand bar, and a lot of wops think we're bartenders and have whiskey to sell."

"We ought not to let them on the bar at all," Alex advised. "If they get here and can't find what they want, they're liable to take anything they can get their hands on. I'm for pulling out the guns and spattering a little lead over the water."

"Are you going to send it over?" called the man from the raft.

"Go take a drink out of the river!" advised Jule.