The Boy Aviators' Flight for a Fortune

Then, having done all he well could under the circumstances, Harry cast himself down in the lee of the weather bulwarks and tried to sleep. But in his scanty attire he was far too cold to do aught but lie and shiver till his teeth chattered. He determined to pass the rest of the night below, and once more sought a couch in the empty bunk. But sleep was a long time coming. Tired, excited and hungry as the boy was, he could not compose himself to slumber. Ten or a dozen times he started up and ran to the deck, thinking that he had heard the distant beat of some vessel’s engines. But each time it proved a false alarm.

At length tired nature asserted herself, and he sank to sleep in good earnest. When he awakened it was daylight, and there was an odd feeling about the motion of the Betsy Jane. She seemed to have ceased her rolling and pitching, and was almost steady in the water. Suddenly there came a jarring crash that almost threw Harry out of the bunk.

Much startled, he ran on deck, and found, to his astonishment, that the vessel lay right off an island. Seemingly she had grounded on a reef of rocks stretching out from the island itself. At any rate, as the waves rocked her she gave a jarring, crunching bump with each pitch of her hull. The island appeared to be a small one, and in general appearance was not unlike Brig Island. In fact, at first Harry had thought that in some magical way the Betsy Jane had drifted back to that small speck of land. But a second glance showed him that the island off which the dismantled hull had grounded differed in many essentials from the one he had left. Far to the westward, about twenty miles as well as the boy could judge, lay a dim streak of dark blue that Harry guessed was the mainland. But for all the good it did him it might have been a hundred miles removed.

Harry was still gazing at the island and wondering how he could reach it before the Betsy Jane pounded herself to pieces on the rocks, when he started violently. The island was not, as he had supposed, uninhabited – at least, he had caught sight of a swirl of blue smoke rising from among the trees on its highest part. This meant help, companionship and food. An involuntary cry of joy rose to the boy’s lips, which the next instant turned to a groan as he looked over the side of the schooner and saw that the reef on which she had struck was much too far out from the shore for him to try to swim the distance, even if a roaring, racing tide would not have made it suicidal to attempt the feat.

“Unless I can attract the attention of whoever lives there by shouting, I’m as badly off as I was before,” exclaimed Harry, in a voice made quavery by panic.

CHAPTER VI. – HARRY MEETS AN OLD FRIEND

All at once, while he was still gazing at the column of smoke shoreward, Harry became aware of a figure coming out of the woods toward the beach. He shouted with all his might, and the man who had appeared from the undergrowth waved a reply.

Then his voice came over the water.

“What’s up?”

The tone somehow was strangely familiar to Harry, and, for that matter, when he had first seen the figure of the newcomer it had struck him with an odd sense of familiarity. Suddenly he realized why this was.

“Ben Stubbs!” he yelled at the top of his lungs.

“Ahoy, mate!” came back after a pause; “who are you?”

“Harry Chester!”

“By the great horn spoon! What the dickens are you doing out there?”

Cupping his hands to make his voice carry the better, Harry hailed back once more.

“I drifted here on this hulk. Can you take me off?”

“Can I? Wait a jiffy.”

Ben Stubbs – for it was actually the “maroon” whom the boys had rescued from a miserable fate in the Nicaraguan treasure valley – began running along the shore as fast as his short legs would carry him. Presently he vanished around a wooded promontory, leaving Harry in a strange jumble of feelings. What could the good-hearted old companion of several of their adventures be doing on this desolate island off the Maine coast? When they had last heard from him he had been running a tug boat line in New York harbor, having purchased the business with the profits made out of the discovery of the treasure trove in the Sargasso Sea.

Before a great while the man who had so opportunely appeared came into view once more This time he was in a skiff, rowing with strong strokes toward the stranded hulk of the Betsy Jane. Harry watched him with eager eyes. Fast as Ben Stubbs rowed, it seemed an eternity to the anxious boy before his strangely rediscovered friend reached the side of the grounded schooner.

When he did so he hastily made fast, and was up the gangway ladder three steps at a time. Fortunately for his haste, the sea had diminished in roughness considerably, and the Betsy Jane lay almost motionless on the reef. Otherwise he would have stood a strong chance of being thrown from his footing. Harry was at the gangway as Ben Stubbs’ weather-beaten countenance came into view at the top of the steps.

Ben seized the boy’s hand in a grip that made Harry flinch, but he returned it with as strong a clench as he could. For a moment both of them were too much overcome with emotion at the strange meeting to utter a word. It was Ben who spoke first.

“Waal, what under the revolving universe are you doing here?” he demanded.

“I was about to ask the same question of you.”

“It’s a long story, boy, and you look just about played out. What has happened? I never dreamed that you were even in this neighborhood.”

“I guess the same thing applies to me, so far as you are concerned, Ben,” rejoined Harry, between a laugh and a sob. “As for myself, I’ve been adrift all night on this old hulk. Some rascals cut her loose from her moorings at Brig Island.”

“Wow! you’ve drifted all the way from there. Why, it’s fifty miles or more away.”

“I know it. It seemed a million to me. What worries me is what the others must be thinking. They won’t know if I’m dead or alive.”

“We’ll find a way to let ’em know, never fear,” struck in Ben in his deep, rumbling voice; “but I reckon you’re hungry and thirsty?”

“Am I? Why, I could eat a horse without sauce or salt, as you used to say.”

“Then get in the skiff and come ashore. I’ve got a sort of a hut there. It ain’t much of a place, but I’ve got enough to eat and a good spring of clear water, and I can give you a suit of slops.”

“But the schooner?” demanded Harry.

“She’ll be all right, I reckon. She’s lying on a sort of sandy ridge that runs out here. The sea’s gone down so that she won’t do herself any harm, and we can’t do her any good right now. You see, the tide is falling. When it rises we’ll try to get her off and anchor her in a snugger berth.”

Harry might have argued the point, but the prospect of food and drink made so strong an appeal to him that he did not stop to waste words. Five minutes later they were rowing ashore, and, while Ben bent to the oars with a will, Harry told him in detail all that happened since they came to Brig Island, and the reason of their presence there. He knew that he was safe in confiding in old Ben.

The relation of his story occupied the entire trip to the shore, and when Ben had beached his skiff he seized Harry by the arm and began hurrying him up the beach toward a small hut, half canvas, half lumber, which stood back under the shelter of a low bluff. The boy was desperately anxious to learn the reason of Ben’s presence on the island, for he knew it could have no ordinary cause. But the weather-beaten old adventurer would not allow the boy to say another word till he had clothed himself and eaten all he could put away of a rabbit stew washed down with strong coffee.

“Now, then,” remarked Ben, as soon as Harry had finished, “I suppose you’re a-dyin’ to hear what I’m doin’ on Barren Island, which is the name of this bit of land?”

“I am, indeed,” declared Harry, shoving back the cracker box which had served him as a chair; “the last person in the world I would have expected to see when the Betsy Jane grounded was Ben Stubbs.”

Ben chuckled.

“Allers turnin’ up, like a bad penny, ain’t I?” he said, shoving some very black tobacco into his old pipe. “’Member ther time I dropped out of the sky in thet dirigible balloon?”

“Well, I should say I did,” laughed Harry; “but how you got here is past my comprehension. What became of the tug boat line?”

Ben snapped his fingers.

“All gone, my lad! Gone just like that! I reckon I’m not a good hand at business, or the crooked tricks that answers for that same. Anyhow, to make a long yarn a short one, I went on a friend’s note and he dug out. That was blow number one. To meet that note I had to mortgage some of my boats, and in some way – blow me if I rightly understand it yet – I got myself in a hole whar’ the lawyer fellers bled me till I was mighty near dry. I tried to struggle along, but it wasn’t no go. Then came a strike of tug boat hands and that finished me. I couldn’t stand the long lay off without anything to do, so I sold out for what I could get, and – and here I am.”

“I’m mighty sorry to hear that you failed, Ben,” said Harry with real sympathy in his tones, “but you haven’t said yet what you are doing here on Barren Island, as you call it.”

“I’m a-gettin’ to that, lad,” said Ben, emitting a cloud of blue smoke; “give me time. As I told you, that feller on whose note I went, skedaddled. You see, I’d trusted him as my own brother, bein’ as I knew his father when I was a miner. He – that’s this chap’s father, I mean – was a Frenchman, Raoul Duval was his name, and his son’s name the same. Old man Duval made his pile in Lower Californy and was makin’ fer his home in New Orleans when ther steamer he was travelin’ on blew up, and he and all his gold dust – a whalin’ big lot of it – went to the bottom.

“I never calculated to hear anything more of Duval arter this, but one day this young feller I’ve been tellin’ you about shows up in New York and hunts me up. He tells me that he’s old Raoul’s son, and that he’d had a run of hard luck and so on, and wants to go into business, and if, for his father’s sake, I’ll help him out. I asks him how he found me out, and he says that in his father’s letters home I had often been mentioned, and that when he heard of the Stubbs Towing Line he made inquiries and found that I was in all probability the same man.

“As I told you, I let him have the money. It don’t matter just how much, but it was quite a bit. You see, I did it for the old man’s sake. I was sorry afterward. Young Duval wasn’t a chip of the old block at all. He was idle and dissipated. His business went under and he skipped out.”

“Did you lend him this money without security of any sort?” asked Harry incredulously.

“In a way, yes. In another way, no. The young chap, when he came to me, had a wild story about knowing where the steamer on which his dad lost his life had sunk. He said that from letters written home before he left Lower Californy, he knew the old man was carrying with him, besides the dust, a fortune in black pearls. Of course, all these went down when the steamer blew up. He had tried, he said, to get a lot of folks interested in a scheme to get at the wreck and recover the dust and the pearls, but they had all laughed at him. He said if I’d give him the money he wanted he’d give me, in return, the plan of the location whar’ the steamer went down.”

“And did he?”

“Yes; but since he acted as he did I guess there’s no more truth in his yarn than there was in anything else he told me. Anyhow, I’ve never bothered my head about the matter since.”

“Have you got the plan?”