"That's too bad!" Amos Fearless gave a deep sigh. "I wanted to keep this a secret."
"The miserable sneak!" went on Dave, indignantly. "I'm going after him and see what he means by such conduct."
And before his father could stop him, the lad was out of the cottage and running toward the beach at his best speed.
As said before, Dave Fearless was a youth of seventeen, tall, well-built, and handsome. He had been brought up along the coast of Long Island Sound, and had spent two years of his life in a lighthouse not far distant from his present residence in the village of Quanatack.
Following in the footsteps of his father, Dave had taken to the water naturally, and no boy on Long Island could swim better, row better, or handle a sailboat more skillfully than he. In addition to this, Dave had often been with his father when the latter was working at his trade as a master diver, and he knew more about the work of a diver than did many men who followed it for a living.
Father and son lived together by themselves, Mrs. Fearless having died several years before. Mr. Fearless had once been fairly well-to-do, but a fire, and the wild speculations of a brother, now dead also, had robbed him of all of his savings and left him with nothing but his hands to depend upon for a living.
The village in which the Fearlesses lived was not a large one, but it contained some people who were very friendly to the master diver and his son, and also contained some who were just the opposite.
Among the latter were Lemuel Hankers and his eighteen-year-old son Bart. The Hankers were distantly related to the Fearlesses, but as the latter were poor, the relationship was never acknowledged by the former. Indeed, Bart Hankers took particular pains to snub Dave Fearless upon every possible occasion.
Some of the snubbings flashed over Dave's mind as he sped after Bart Hankers, who was running to where he had left a small boat tied up at one of the village docks.
"I'll show him that he is not to play the sneak on us, even if he does snub me," muttered Dave, as he reached the dock, to find Bart just entering the rowboat.