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
