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?"
"Sure enough," Ben fumbled in his pocket, "here it is; it's a roughly
drawn thing, as you see, but I reckon if the ship was really there it
would be an easy matter to locate her bones."
Harry nodded. He was looking over the map with deep attention. It was,
as Ben had said, a crudely drawn affair, and purported to have been
sketched by one of the survivors of the wreck, who, of course, did not
know that in the returning miner's cabin there was so much wealth.
"How did young Duval get hold of this?" he asked at last.
"He said that by chance he met a man who was the lone survivor of the
disaster. This feller didn't know who Duval was, and began talking to
him about the wreck. Duval, recollecting that his father had carried a
sum that amounted to more than $75,000, was naturally interested. He
asked the man if he could draw him a sketch of the scene where the
steamer sank. The feller said he could, and that thar sketch is what he
drawed. At least that's Duval's story, and I'm frank to tell you I don't
believe a word of it."
"But still you haven't told me what you are doing on this island," said
Harry after an interval.
"That's so, too, lad. I got so interested in tellin' my troubles I clean
forgot about Barren Island. Well, it's this way. Arter the crash I felt
ashamed to show my face. Oh, all the creditors were paid up--every last
one of 'em. But I felt like I was an old failure, and good fer nuthin',
so I remembered all of a sudden about this island that I'd been stranded
on a good many years ago. I made inquiries and found that I could live
here rent free as long as I liked, with none to interfere, and so I came
here. It's quiet and might be lonesome to some folks, but it suits me
well enough, and I was calculatin' to spend the rest of my days here,
till you came along. But I feel different now."
"How's that?" asked Harry, not knowing well just what to say to the old
man who took his business failure so much to heart.
"Why, I was watching you studyin' that map. I could see by yer face that
you put some stock in Duval's yarn. Ain't that so?"
Harry could not but confess that it was. The old man's story, and the
map, had aroused in him the strong desire for adventure that both Boy
Aviators possessed to a marked degree. Of course, from what Ben had
said, Duval did not appear to be a person on whom much reliance could be
placed, but then, again, there was the map, and it at least, even if
crude, appeared to have been a genuine effort to mark the spot where the
wreck lay. It showed a bayou marked "Black Bayou," running back from the
main stream of the Mississippi. A black dot some distance up this bayou
was lettered "Belle of New Orleans," presumably the name of the steamer
on which Duval met his end.
The boy was still pondering over the map when, from seaward, there came
a sound that made both Harry Chester and Ben Stubbs spring to their
feet.
"It's a gun!" shouted the old man, as the booming echoes died away; "may
be a ship in distress."
"Hardly, in this weather," rejoined Harry, in a perplexed tone.
But Ben Stubbs had darted from the shanty and was running for the
beached skiff. A minute later Harry was close on his heels, and
presently they were pulling around the point, about to run into the
surprise of their lives.