"This is the end of our cruise in the Hawk," muttered Dick, staring gloomily at the useless air ship, "and if this tight little island hadn't bounced up right in front of us just when we needed it most, the cruise would have been the end of us, too. But there's no use overhauling our hard luck. We're here, and we're safe, and we'd be worse than cannibals not to be satisfied. Let's slant away for those palms, doff our wet gear and sit in the shade till the sun dries our clothes."
"A good idea," assented Matt. "After we get dried out we'll pitch some sort of a camp and try and run up a flag of distress on one of the palm trees. We could be a whole lot worse off than we are, pards."
"Anyvay," grumbled Carl, while he was getting out of his clothes and spreading them in the sun to dry, "we don'd findt dot Durdle Islandt, und ve von't efer know vedder dere iss a iron chest on der islandt or nod."
"Fiend take the iron chest!" grunted Dick.
"You don'd care nodding for dot?" queried Carl, mildly surprised.
"Not a hap'orth. The time has come, Carl, when Motor Matt and his mates have got to look out for Number One. Maskee! If we're hung up on this two-by-twice turtle-back for long, the five thousand we're to get from Townsend won't be a whack-up to what we're losing in Atlantic City. It's a fair bad break we made, coming off on this jamboree. We wouldn't have done it if it hadn't been Townsend that asked us."
"That's the plain truth of it, Dick," said Matt. "Townsend had a claim on us and we were in duty bound to help him."
Carl, in his eagerness to be looking around the island, got into his clothes before they were fairly dry. Leaving Matt and Dick to talk, the Dutch boy ambled away and was quickly out of sight over the knoll that formed the backbone of the island.
"This looks like a case of where the wrong triumphs over the right," observed Dick. "Jurgens, who's a swab and a crook from heels to sky-piece, puts as brazen a piece of work as I ever heard of right over the plate. And it seems as though he was going to score, at that."
"He'll get his come-up-with before long," declared Matt. "That sort of crookedness may win for a little while, but it's bound to lose out in the long run."