“Well, I’ll be double-darned, horn-swaggled——”
That was all, but there was a wealth of meaning in his tone.
Lathrop and Billy stood to one side, both realized what the Boy Aviators must be suffering at the sudden dashing to the earth of their high hopes. A cruder disappointment could not in fact be imagined. The work of their brains and the fruit of long experiment and research had been swallowed by the same hungry sea that had destroyed two of their enemies.
Practical Ben Stubbs broke the silence.
“Here you get along home and tell ’em to send us some grub,” he ordered the lanky young moonshiner who had escorted them. “I reckon we’ll camp out to-night.”
When the man had hurried off, Ben set to work getting a fire. When he had it in a bright blaze he shouted:
“All hands to the fire to get dry; no use of dying of rumatiz even if the sloop is gone.”
The boys, despondent as they were, saw the wisdom of his words and crowded about the blaze. They stripped to their underwear and hung their garments on a sort of long stick laid across two forked ones stuck in the ground about six feet apart in front of the fire.
“Now, that’s ship-shape,” he remarked when a row of wet clothes were hung on his handiwork to dry in the warmth, “next thing to do is to consider the situation, as the young man said when they offered him a good job as hangman.”
Ben’s flow of spirits had an effect on all the boys, who sat dejectedly around the fire in their wet underclothes. To tell the truth the old adventurer was far from feeling as cheerful as he tried to appear, but like all men who have faced real hardships he knew the value of making the best of a situation.