“What’s the matter?” asked Don, for David’s face became clouded again when he thought of his father and Dan.

“There’s a good deal the matter,” replied David, “but it is nothing I can help.”

“You don’t act like yourself at all to-day,” continued Don.  “Suppose you go home and take a rest.  Don’t brood over your troubles, whatever they are.  Let them go, if you can’t help them.  Think about pleasant things, and to-morrow you will come up here, feeling like a new boy.  Bert and I will set the traps we have made this morning, and then we’ll go up and take a look at our bear trap.”

David thought it would be a good plan to follow this advice, so he closed the door of the shop to keep the pointer from following him, and started for home.

“Well,” said Bert, as he picked up his knife and resumed work upon the figure four he was making, “Dave has seen his father!”

“And had trouble with him, too,” added Don.

“It was about the pointer,” said Bert.

“My idea exactly.  Godfrey is hiding somewhere in the cane; Dan wanted to make a little more money without work, so he stole the pointer and gave him to his father to keep until I offered a reward for him.  David found it out, and to save me from being swindled, he recovered the pointer and got himself into difficulty by it.”

The boys, who were merely guessing at all this, would have been surprised to know that their surmises were all correct.  David and his troubles, and his manful efforts to better his condition in spite of his adverse circumstances, afforded them topics of conversation while they were at work; and when the figure four, on which Bert was employed, was completed, the mule was harnessed to the wagon, and the boys drove off to set the half a dozen new traps they had built that morning.  It was twelve o’clock when they returned, and they found lunch waiting for them.  When they had done ample justice to it, they began making hasty preparations for their visit to the island, and a quarter of an hour more saw them well on their way up the bayou.

They found to their great delight that the ducks were beginning to come in now, and Don was kept busy rowing from one side of the bayou to the other to pick up the dead and wounded birds that Bert brought out of the numerous flocks which took wing as they approached.  After a dozen fine fat mallards had been brought to bag, Bert declared that it was a sin to shoot any more, and took his place at the oars, while Don sat in the stern and steered.

“These ducks tell us that it is time to go to our shooting-box,” said the latter.  “We always wait until they begin to come in before we make up our party, you know.”

“We ought to go over there and fix up a bit first,” said Bert.  “If we don’t find anything in our trap, let’s go over there and see how things look.  We have had some splendid times in that little shooting-box, haven’t we?”