“There he slowly got better until he was well enough to write and ask me to come to see him. He wanted me to do something that no one else would do.”
“And what is that?” asked Mrs. Bobbsey.
“He wants me to get a big motor boat, and go with him to this island and get that boy, Jack Nelson.”
“Is that boy still on the island?” asked Mrs. Bobbsey. “Why how long ago was this?”
“About three weeks,” her husband answered. “Cousin Jasper does not know whether or not the boy is still there, but he is afraid he is. You see when the boat came to rescue Mr. Dent, as my cousin is called at the hospital, they did not take off with him his boy friend. The sailors of the rescue ship said they saw Cousin Jasper’s canvas flag fluttering from a pole stuck up in the beach, and that brought them to the island. They found Cousin Jasper, unconscious, in a little cave-like shelter near shore, and took him away with them.”
“Didn’t they see the boy?” asked Nan.
"No, he was not in sight, the sailors afterward told Mr. Dent. They did not look for any one else, not knowing that two had been shipwrecked on the island. They thought there was only one, and so Cousin Jasper alone was saved.
“When he grew better, and the fever left him, he tried to get some one to start out in a boat to go to the island and save that boy. But no one would go.”
“Why not?” asked Mrs. Bobbsey.
“Because they thought Cousin Jasper was still out of his mind from fever. They said the sailors from the rescue ship had seen no one else, and if there had been a boy on the island such a person would have been near Mr. Dent. But no one was seen on the island, and so they thought it was all a dream of Cousin Jasper’s.”