“You can say what you like,” Giraffe was remarking, as he carefully drained the coffee-pot into his tin cup, that being his third allowance; “I think the Silver Fox Patrol was hatched out under a lucky star. We’ve had heaps and heaps of good things happen to us in times past; and now just to think that the old frame building we’ve been using for a high school for years, should go and take fire and burn to the ground, a month or six weeks before the new brick schoolhouse could be furnished and heated, compelling the Board to dismiss school for that time. Let me tell you it’s a mighty bad wind that blows good to nobody.”
“But that’s only a part of our great good luck, and you forget that, Giraffe,” insisted Davy Jones, nodding his head, eagerly, as he looked around at the live oak trees, in the crooked and wide spreading branches of which he expected to soon be sporting, holding on with his toes, and swinging from limb to limb with the abandon of an ape.
“Why, to be sure, I had ought to enumerate the rest!” declared the lanky member of the patrol. “Think of it, how just after that sad catastrophe—excuse me, boys, while I wipe a tear away in memory of that poor old schoolhouse—there was that strange letter came to Thad’s bully old guardian, Daddy Caleb Cushman Brewster, from a man he used to know years ago. It was written from down here in Southern Louisiana, and told how the writer had seen one Felix Jasper, with a very pretty if ragged little girl in his company, hurrying along a lonely trail that led into old Alligator Swamp, and acting like he had recognized the gentleman, and was afraid to let him come any closer.”
“Yes,” spoke up Thad, who in the absence of the regular scout-master, Dr. Philander Hobbs, always acted as the leader of the troop, “and all of you chance to know that years ago, when I was much smaller, and lived in another town, that man Felix Jasper was the manager of my mother’s estate, and was found to be stealing from her, so he was discharged. Later on my only little sister, Pauline, strangely disappeared, and could never be found. It was believed at the time that Jasper in a spirit of revenge had stolen the little child, but he could not be located; and the grief of that loss I really believe hastened the death of my dear mother.”
Thad was so overcome with emotion that he could not go on. His chums cast sympathetic looks at him, for they were very fond of their leader; then Allan Hollister took up the narrative by saying:
“And his gentleman who happened to glimpse the man and girl, and who had known of the circumstances in the past, wrote that he felt almost certain he had been looking on the face of the long-lost little Brewster girl. Daddy was laid up with one of his attacks of rheumatism; and besides, he could never have stood such a trip. So he put up an unlimited amount of spending money, enough to allow the whole patrol to make the trip by rail; and here we are, determined to stand by our chum, and penetrate this dismal Louisiana swamp to find out whether it is Thad’s sister and Felix Jasper who are living somewhere about here; or if the gentleman made a bad mistake.”
“Yes,” went on Bob White, impulsively, for he was a true, warm-hearted Southern boy, a little touchy with regard to his “honor,” but a splendid and loyal comrade for all that, “and we’re bound to do it, I reckon, suh, or know the reason why.”
“The first thing we did when we got down here,” Giraffe went on to say, “was to pick up all the information connected with this swamp we could, which was not a great lot, because they seem to think it’s a terrible place, and few persons ever dream of penetrating its unexplored depths, except now and then a muskrat trapper, or an alligator-skin collector; though they do say it’s been an asylum for occasional negro convicts who broke away from the turpentine camps and were pursued by the dogs.”
“Huh! looks some like we might be up against the toughest proposition we ever tackled, believe me,” Step Hen observed.
“Well,” remarked Bumpus, composedly, “we’ve pretty nearly always come out on top, haven’t we; and according to my notion we’re strong enough to do it again.”