Once Captain Holt’s short, sturdy body was descried in the offing tramping the sand-dunes on his way to Fogarty’s, and a signal flag—­part of Mother Fogarty’s flannel petticoat, and blood-red, as befitted the desperate nature of the craft over which it floated, was at once set in his honor.  The captain put his helm hard down and came up into the wind and alongside the hulk.

“Well! well! well!” he cried in his best quarterdeck voice—­“what are you stowaways doin’ here?” and he climbed the ladder and swung himself over the battered rail.

Archie took his hand and led him into the most sacred recesses of the den, explaining to him his plans for defence, his armament of barrel hoops, and his ammunition of shells and pebbles, Tod standing silently by and a little abashed, as was natural in one of his station; at which the captain laughed more loudly than before, catching Archie in his arms, rubbing his curly head with his big, hard hand, and telling him he was a chip of the old block, every inch of him—­none of which did either Archie or Tod understand.  Before he climbed down the ladder he announced with a solemn smile that he thought the craft was well protected so far as collisions on foggy nights were concerned, but he doubted if their arms were sufficient and that he had better leave them his big sea knife which had been twice around Cape Horn, and which might be useful in lopping off arms and legs whenever the cutthroats got too impudent and aggressive; whereupon Archie threw his arms around his grizzled neck and said he was a “bully commodore,” and that if he would come and live with them aboard the hulk they would obey his orders to a man.

Archie leaned over the rotten rail and saw the old salt stop a little way from the hulk and stand looking at them for some minutes and then wave his hand, at which the boys waved back, but the lad did not see the tears that lingered for an instant on the captain’s eyelids, and which the sea-breeze caught away; nor did he hear the words, as the captain resumed his walk:  “He’s all I’ve got left, and yet he don’t know it and I can’t tell him.  Ain’t it hell?”

Neither did they notice that he never once raised his eyes toward the House of Refuge as he passed its side.  A new door and a new roof had been added, but in other respects it was to him the same grewsome, lonely hut as on that last night when he had denounced his son outside its swinging door.

Often the boys made neighborly visits to friendly tribes and settlers.  Fogarty was one of these, and Doctor Cavendish was another.  The doctor’s country was a place of buttered bread and preserves and a romp with Rex, who was almost as feeble as Meg had been in his last days.  But Fogarty’s cabin was a mine of never-ending delight.  In addition to the quaint low house of clapboards and old ship-timber, with its sloping roof and little toy windows, so unlike his own at Yardley, and smoked ceilings, there was a scrap heap piled up and scattered