One more thing had made a lasting impression on him. “Jack, my boy,” said his uncle, who limped as a result of wounds received in France, “the thing I want most to tell you is this. While you are in service you will have comrades, many boon companions, and if you treat them right, as I know you will, you’re sure to make attachments that will last as long as you live. You see, Jack, you’ll be living under difficult conditions, enduring hardships, and facing great dangers together. Your souls will be tried as by fire and you’ll be welded together, the way steel is welded.” Yes, Jack thought now, Uncle Dan was right. We have grown closer and closer to one another. There’s Stew and Ted, Kentucky, Red, the Commander, and all the others. We’ll never forget one another. That’s one reason why I’m so eager to get back to the _Black Bee_. Yes, he decided finally, I’ll do it, even if it does mean taking a chance. I’ll do it the first thing in the morning. Then he awakened Stew for his watch, stretched himself out, and fell asleep at once. He was up again before dawn. “Tell you what!” he exclaimed over a cup of coffee. “I’m going to find out who those fellows are.” “The men with that queer plane?” Stew asked. “Yes. We’ve got to know. They might help us get back to our ship.” “And then again they might not—they might do just the opposite,” Stew suggested. “That’s a chance we’ll have to take. You’d better stay here and sort of look after things,” he suggested. “I may discover something big. We might want to get off this island in a hurry.” “Get off?” Stew stared. “Yes, but how?” “There’s the Jap raft, you know. It’s seaworthy. We’ve got supplies of a sort, enough to last us weeks with the birds and fish we’d catch. If it seemed the thing to do, we could slip the raft out into the current and get away rather rapidly.” “I suppose so,” Stew agreed. Jack stood up. Should he tell Stew of the night visitor? After a moment’s thought he decided against that. A half hour later, after hurrying over the native trail, he found himself slipping silently through the brush toward the camp of the strangers. “I’ll just look before I show myself,” he whispered to the empty air. All of a sudden he stopped to listen. A low, whispering wail had reached his ear. “Too late.” His hopes fell. “They’re off.” Yet as he listened the wail died away. “Probably testing their motors,” he assumed. Once more he crept through the brush. Three times the wail rose and fell, but he pushed straight on until the smoke from a campfire told him he was close to the edge of the tangled mass of palms and tropical brush beside the strangers’ camp. Choosing a young date palm, whose fronds sprouted close to the ground, he crept to it and crouched there a minute. Rising to his knees, he parted the slender fronds to look away to the sloping rock.