zell could really guess
whether the face belonged to the living or the dead. The sight
caused cold shivers to run up and down their spines, for that
face was ghastly and haunting in the extreme.

But quickly Tom Reade found his voice sufficiently to ask huskily:

"What's your trouble, my friend?"

CHAPTER IX

THE START OF A BAD NIGHT

Without noise, leaving barely a ripple behind, that head sank
from view. It had vanished in an instant before the eyes of the
two thoroughly startled high school boys.

"He's drowning now!" gasped Dan, as the head failed to bob up
again into view. "Oh, Tom, we must save him!"

"Wait!" said Reade, in a quivering voice. His eyes expressed
uncertainty as to how he should act.

"But he's drowning. You see, he hasn't come up again!" Dalzell
insisted.

"Drowning---in water shallow enough for small bushes to grow from
the bottom?" demanded Reade. "Of course not! But what does it
mean---and why didn't the fellow speak?"

"Perhaps---i---i---it was a---dead man," suggested Dalzell.

"That's what I'm trying to figure out," replied Reade. "I---I
almost thought I saw the man's eyelids move."

"I thought so, too," agreed Dan, "but now I'm inclined to believe
that we didn't. Wait! I'm going to get close to the bushes."

Dan drove the paddle into the water a few times, bringing the
canoe up alongside the bushes, when it was seen that these were
standing up from a square framework of wood.

"Now, what do you think of that?" asked Reade in perplexity.
"These are freshly cut bushes, that have been fastened to this
frame to-day. The frame will float wherever wind or current may
take it. I thought this was shallow water. I'll soon know."

Tom had, among his tackle, a line with a sinker attached. He
tossed the sinker over the side of the canoe, paying out the line
until the sinker touched bottom. Then he pulled the line in again,
carefully measuring by his arm as much of the line as was wet.

"Danny," he announced solemnly, "at this point the water is from
twenty-seven to thirty feet deep."

"Then that man did drown!" breathed Dalzell, his face as white
as chalk.

"Of course he did," Tom agreed, "provided he was alive when we
saw him."

"But he had to be alive," protested Dan, "or else he couldn't
have nailed the framework together and decorated it with branches
from bushes."

"That is, if the man we saw made the frame," propounded Reade
in a very solemn voice