Page:Cornelia Meigs-The Pirate of Jasper Peak.djvu/15

 there to fifteen, twenty, twenty-five miles of open water, again narrowing to mere winding channels choked with islands. Hugh would have liked to say afterward that he knew even from  the map that this was a region promising adventures, that down the lake’s winding tributaries he  was going to be carried to strange discoveries,  but, as a matter of fact, he had no such foreknowledge.

Indeed, it was his father who observed that the lake looked like a proper haunt for pirates and  Hugh who reminded him that pirates were not  ever to be found so far north. All the books he had seen, pictured them as burying treasure on  warm, sunny, sandy beaches, or flying in pursuit  of their prey on the wings of the South Sea  winds. Pirates in the wooded regions to the north of the Mississippi Valley, pirates where the  snow lay so deep and the lake was frozen for  nearly half the year, where only through a short  summer could the waters be plied by “a low, raking, black hulk” such as all pirates sail—it was  not to be thought of! Even now, when Hugh