Harper's Round Table, July 21, 1896

Copyright, 1896, by Harper & Brothers. All Rights Reserved.

To tell the story of Will Hall's trip to the tropics may seem like telling dangerous secrets and getting people into trouble. But there is this to be considered about it: If the Spaniards catch Will's father, they will shoot him, anyhow; so it can do no harm to admit that Henry Hall, who is Will's father, and David Hall, who is Will's uncle, are engaged in the perilous business of carrying patriots across from the Florida Keys to the Cuban coast.
Will has nothing whatever to do with this business, for he is a school-boy in New York, storing his mind with regular and irregular verbs, and a vast amount of information about football and '96 pneumatic tires. So when his father took him down in the schooner to the Florida Keys to visit Uncle David, Will had no idea that ten days after leaving New York he would be crawling through a Cuban thicket, dodging Spanish soldiers.
Matacumbia Key, at the very tip of Florida, where Uncle David lives with his daughter Vic, is a long way from New York, and Will had never seen either of them, and, of course, had never seen their house on the beach, with the whole Florida Strait for a front yard, and nothing between their shady piazza and the Cuban coast but eighty miles of salt water.
There ought to be some sport down there, he told the boys before he started. Plenty of boating and fishing, you know, and cocoanut-trees, with monkeys in them, I suppose, and maybe some sharks to kill. Lonesome, though. You see, there ain't many people, and my cousin Vic is only fourteen. A little country girl of fourteen can't be much company for a New York chap nearly sixteen.
There was sport in plenty, but not exactly the kind that Will expected. The little country girl took her cousin in hand in a way that astonished him, and would have made him miserable if the Cuban adventure had not given him a chance to show what he was made of.
At first Vic was shy—painfully shy. She kept her eyes cast down, and only answered Yes, sir, or No, sir, when Will spoke to her.