As fast as the birds were caught, they could be locked up in one of the empty negro cabins; and any one who found out that they were there and tried to steal them, would run the risk of being caught by Don’s hounds.  It was a splendid plan, taken altogether, and David’s eyes fairly glistened while it was unfolded to him.  He thanked the brothers over and over again for their kindness and the interest they took in his success, and might have kept on thanking them if Don had not interrupted him with—­

“O, that’s all understood.  Now, before you begin work on those traps we want you to help us one day.  We’ve had a good deal of excitement and some good luck since we last saw you.  We have recovered my canoe, which somebody stole from me, and we have found out that there is a bear living on Bruin’s Island.”

“He must be a monster, too, for such growls I never heard before,” said Bert.

“Didn’t you see him?” asked David.

“No.  We landed to explore the island, and while we were going through the cane he growled at us, and we took the hint and left.  We didn’t have a single load of heavy shot with us.  We’re going up there to-morrow, and we want you to go with us.  We’ll go fixed for him, too.  We’ll have a couple of good dogs with us; I’ll take my rifle; Bert will take father’s heavy gun; and we’d like to have you take your single-barrel.  If he gets a bullet and three loads of buckshot in his head, he’ll not growl at us any more.  If we don’t get a chance to shoot him, we’ll build a trap and catch him alive the next time he comes to the island.  Will you go?”

Of course David would go.  He would have gone anywhere that Don told him to go.  He promised to be at the barn at an early hour the next morning, and then showed a desire to leave the shop; so Don unlocked the door, and David hurried out and turned his face toward the landing.  He had money now, and that grocery bill should not trouble him any longer.

“If there ever was a lucky boy in the world I am the one,” thought David, whose spirits were elevated in the same ratio in which they had before been depressed.  “I’ll earn my hundred and fifty dollars now, and mother shall have her nice things in spite of Dan and Lester.  It isn’t every fellow who has such friends as Don and Bert Gordon.  But I shall have a hard time of it, anyhow.  Dan will be so mad when he finds out that he can’t ruin me, that he will do something desperate.”

David, however, did not waste much time in thinking of the troubles that might come in the future.  He preferred to think about pleasanter things.  He was so wholly engrossed with his plans that it seemed to him that he was not more than five minutes in reaching the landing.  There was no one in the street, and nothing there worth looking at, except General Gordon’s white horse, which was hitched to a post in front of Silas Jones’s store.  As David approached, the General himself came out, accompanied by the grocer, who was as polite and attentive to his rich customers as he was indifferent to the poor ones.