"Seems to me that there letter clears me and Bob of everything except taking you aboard the White Squall when we didn't want to do it," said Tony, after a pause. "We was as innocent as babbies of what happened afterwards."
"If you didn't want to do it what made you?" demanded Joe.
This brought Tony to the story he had to tell; and as I believe I can make it clearer to you than he did to Joe and his friends, I will tell it in my own language.
Rowe Shelly's guardian, who was fond of the water, kept a swift sailing-vessel as well as a steam yacht, and Tony and Bob Bradley belonged to it. The colonel furnished them a house, gave them regular employment during the yachting season, and in the winter time permitted them to make what money they could by shooting water-fowl at the lower end of the island for the New London markets. They knew nothing whatever of the colonel's private affairs. They had heard a good many rumors.
"I want to say a word right there," interrupted Roy. "Where did those rumors come from?"
The boys had seated themselves on the ground on each side of the sailors, who ate their dinner as they talked. Tony acted as spokesman, but his brother jogged his memory with a word now and then. The former could not say where the rumors came from, but the mischief was all done by an old sailor, who settled on one of the uninhabited islands in the harbor and went to fishing for a livelihood. Rowe Shelly chanced to run athwart his hawse one day while sailing about in his boat. He talked with the old fellow for more than two hours, and when he came home he exploded a bomb-shell in his guardian's ear. In other words, he told the colonel that there was no relationship between them; that he had no business with the money he was squandering; that his father had not been lost at sea, as the colonel affirmed; that he was still alive, and so was his mother; that they lived in Chelsea, Maryland; and that he was going to them as soon as he could get off the island.
"I know that was a sassy way for him to talk to the man who had always been so good to him, seeing that he hadn't no better evidence than an old sailor-man's unsupported word to back him up," said Tony, "but the way the colonel acted satisfied Rowe at once that there was more'n a grain of truth in what he had heard. The first thing he done was to take away the boy's boat, and shut him up on the island as close as if it had been a jail, and his second, to get rid of the fisherman. How he done it nobody seems to know; but he wasn't never seen again, nuther by Rowe Shelly nor nobody else. But the mischief had been done, and the first thing we knowed, Rowe Shelly couldn't be found. How he got off the island nobody couldn't tell, but he and his bisickle was gone. They was gone for more'n two weeks; but Willis, who acts like he was as big a man on the island as the colonel himself, follered him up and ketched him with the help of detectives."
"How did this fisherman happen to know so much about Rowe's father and mother?" inquired Arthur.
"He was shipmates with 'em; lived next door to them in some town down South," replied Tony. "He knowed the little boy, Rowe Shelly, and used to trot him on his knee and tell him stories of furrin parts, and he knowed well enough that there was some sort o' hocus-pocus about it, or the colonel wouldn't never had that money the old grandfather left. You see it sorter hurt the old feller when Cap'n Shelly, who was his only child, married a widder with a growed-up son against his will, and it hurt him, too, to have the cap'n keep on going to sea when he didn't want him to; and so he said that the cap'n shouldn't never have a red cent of his money. But when Grandfather Shelly found that he'd got to pass in his checks, and that the dark river was waiting for him, he gives in and willed all the money to the cap'n, provided he would settle down on shore."