fair-sized trout.

"How's that for a starter, eh, Ethan?" he demanded joyously. "Think you
can beat that for a beginning? Right back of that point there's the boss
bay; and say, you couldn't drop in a stone without hitting a trout,
they're that thick. I stuck right in the same place all along; no need
to move around."

"You got a fine mess, though I believe I could eat that many myself,"
ventured Lub, eyeing the string hungrily.

"Oh! we can get all we want," he was told; "it's only a question of
finding the bait. They're just asking to be taken on. It's hit and come
with them as soon as you drop your line in. The bait hardly sinks a foot
before it's taken. I never saw anything like it in all my life. And
fight, say, they bent my rod double lots of times. I lost more'n I
saved."

"But about the canoe," Phil went on to say, "the chances are it must
belong to whoever was in our cabin before we came."

"That stands to reason, seems to me," Ethan agreed.

"Well, he had the use of your shack, goodness knows how long, Phil,"
said Lub, with an imitation of his father's solemn manner when
delivering an opinion from the bench; "and it's only fair you have the
use of his boat. Tit for tat, you know. One balances the other. Besides,
we are not supposed to know whose boat it is."

"There's something else I wanted to tell you about," remarked X-Ray.

He was thrusting a hand inside his coat as he spoke; and when it came
out again the others saw that it held something like a buff colored
envelope, torn open.

"Now, I found this same when I was nosing around," he explained. "It was
caught tight away under this seat in the bow, and must have been blown
there by the wind."

"Looks like one of those telegraph envelopes," remarked Lub.

"Which is exactly what it is," said X-Ray Tyson, as he offered the
object in question to Phil. "There's an enclosure inside; read it, and
see what you can make of the same. It got me balled up a whole lot, I'm
telling you."

Phil quickly had the enclosure out. It was a printed form, and had a
message written upon it.

"John Newton:
Winchester, N. Y. (hold until called for).

"Stay where you are. Search grows warmer daily. Too bad for
both you can't compromise.

"RUTGERS."

Phil read it all out slowly, and Lub listened very seriously.

"First," Phil went on to say, "the man's name, or the one he goes by
right n