The mysterious stranger, whether shipwrecked seaman, savage, or
hobgoblin, who kept all the bearded inhabitants of Rockhouse on the
alert, had reappeared in his old quarters, where another litter of
leaves had been miraculously strewn exactly in the same place the
former had occupied.
Beyond this, however, and sundry gashes here and there--of which
Fritz's knife was clearly guilty, but which could not have been
perpetrated without an accomplice--nothing had transpired to enable
them to arrive at a satisfactory conclusion as to who or what this
personage could be.
Though the hypothesis was highly improbable, still Willis persisted in
his theory of the shipwreck; he only doubted whether the individual on
shore was a marine or the cabin-boy, an officer or a foremast man,
and, if the latter, whether it was Bill, Tom, Bob, or Ned.
Ernest rather inclined to think that the invisible stranger was an
inhabitant of the moon, who, in consequence of a false step, had
tumbled from his own to our planet.
The warlike Fritz was impatient and irritated. He would over and over
again have preferred an immediate solution of the affair, even were it
bathed in blood, rather than be kept any longer in suspense.
Frank, on the contrary, took a metaphysical view of the case; and,
believing that Providence had not entirely dispensed with miracles in
dealing with the things of this world, came to the conclusion that it
was no earthly visitor they had to deal with; and he even went so far
as to hint that prayer was a more efficacious means of solving the
mystery than the methods his brothers were pursuing.
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