After a few minutes’ travel they emerged without warning into a spherical clearing, perhaps sixty feet in circumference. All about it stood palmetto-thatched huts in which crouched timid-looking women and children. The place was enclosed by a solid wall of trees and closely growing vines. Great gray beards of Spanish moss waved from the trees above them. It was a spot that would have been impossible to find unless one had the key to the forest labyrinth. It was evidently the men’s home.
In one portion of the clearing was a singular apparatus that attracted the attention of the boys at once, puzzled though they were over their position, and whether they were in the hands of friends or enemies. This object was a huge iron kettle that was placed over a blazing fire of fat pine-knots. This fire was being fed by a youth who might have been the brother of one of the men who stopped them in the forest. A cover, evidently fashioned from some kind of wood, covered the iron pot and from this lid a pipe of metal led to a crude trough. From the end of the pipe was constantly dripping a colorless liquid which was carefully gathered into a small tin by the man stationed at the trough, and from time to time, he and others in the clearing took a sip from the tin. Overcome by curiosity Harry asked a lanky youth, who slouched by just then, what the affair might be.
“Don’t ask no questions, stranger, and you won’t git told no lies,” was the impudent reply that made Harry hanker—as he whispered to Billy—to “land the perambulating clothes-horse one on the jaw.”
But the mystery was soon to be cleared up and in a surprising way. While the boys were still wondering what sort of a place and into what sort of company they could have fallen, a figure came striding toward them that they at once recognized with a thrill of delight at seeing a familiar face.
The newcomer was Ben Stubbs.
He looked rather sheepish as the boys hailed him with loud shouts of delight and seemed embarrassed when Frank asked him what he was doing in this queer settlement.
“Wall, boys,” he said at length, “I declar’ to goodness I don’ know but what you’ll think I’m a piratical sort of craft, but—but the fact is that these folks around this yere camp are old shipmates of mine in a manner of speaking, an’ so you needn’t be a bit afeard. Yer as safe as if you were in your own bunks.”
As may be imagined this did not at all clear up the clouds of mystery that Ben Stubbs’ sudden appearance had aroused in the boys’ minds.
“Yes, but who are these people?” demanded Frank.
“How did you get here?” chimed in Harry.