The Boy Aviators' Flight for a Fortune. Goldfrap John Henry

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.”