The Boy Aviators' Flight for a Fortune. Goldfrap John Henry
rest of that afternoon he passed watching the empty sea for some sign of a ship, but not a trace of one could he discover. Utterly disheartened he watched the sun set in a blaze of crimson and gold. The sunset lay behind him, and Harry knew by this that he was drifting east at a rapid rate. Just how rapid he had, of course, no means of calculating. Of one thing he was thankful – the sea had not increased, and the wind appeared to have fallen considerably with the departure of daylight.
“Surely,” thought the boy, “I must have drifted on the track of ocean vessels by this time. I know there’s a line to Halifax, and another to Portland, besides the coasters.”
With this thought came another. What if he should be run down during the night? The idea sent a shudder through his scantily clothed form. He knew that derelicts are often the cause of marine disasters, and during the dark hours the hulk might invite such a fate if he did not take steps to guard against it.
Accordingly he lit his lantern and hung it in the underpinning of the inclined superstructure.
“At least they can see that,” he thought, as he completed the hanging of his warning light.
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