When we got back to the yacht, there was the Chief, peacefully reading a last year’s magazine.  We routed him up, and cooked the dinner.  While we were eating, the question arose:  who was to go to Rogers’s Island?

“We’ll draw lots,” said someone.  We did so,—­with slips of paper, and I was more than pleased when I saw that I had,—­well, I was going to say:  won.  I thought I had won at the time, and I was tickled at the idea of going on this expedition by myself.

As we were separated from our boat, clothes, and all our belongings, Sprague fitted me out with some money, and I left Lanesport on the horse-car.  At Squid Cove I looked anxiously to see if the car-driver would remember me, and I was glad to see a boy, about my own age, driving the old horse.

“Gran’father’s gone over to Bailey’s Harbor,” said he, “to see if the burglars have come back.  Gee!  I’d like to see a burglar, wouldn’t you?  Gee! they say these had black masks, an’ six-shooters, an’ bottles of chloro-chlory—­of that stuff they put folks to sleep with.  An’ brass knuckles.  Say, did you ever see any brass knuckles?  I did.  I know a feller that has got a pair.  He keeps ’em in the hay in the barn, so’s his father won’t get onto him.  Gee!  They put the burglars into the new jail, but they all got out, an’ no one knows how they did it.  Nate Bradley come back on his milk-cart from Bailey’s and he says he went into the jail, an’ the cells was all locked up, so they must have clumb out through the bars somehow.  Gee!  No one can find old Mose Silloway, an’ they think the burglars drownded him, outer revenge.  Giddap!”

He leaned over the front of the car and hit the horse a loud slap, with the ends of his reins.

“Gee!  You bet Eb Flanders is madder than a settin’ hen!”

“Who is he?” said I. Which was guile on my part.

“He’s constable.  He caught the burglars, y’know, right in the face ‘n eyes of two policemen from Lanesport.  An’ when they got away, Eb pretty near bust his biler.  He got his possy together again, an’ he says he’ll have ’em back if it takes a leg, an’ when he gets ’em he’ll set over ’em night an’ day, with a shot-gun.  Gee!”

He hit the horse another slap with the reins, and then turned to grin at me through a gap where four front teeth were missing.  He was a jolly looking boy, with a round, red face like the rising moon.

“I wouldn’t like to be them burglars, when Eb ketches hold of ’em again,” he continued.  “No, sir.  Why, Eb arrested two fellers last summer for haulin’ Levi Sanborn’s lobster-pots,—­he took an’ tied ‘em back to back an’ carried ’em over to Lanesport in his boat, an’ turned ’em over to the police.  One feller got six months in the House of C’rrection.  Gee!  You’re goin’ to Bailey’s, aint yer?”

“No, I’m going to Rogers’s Island.”

“You be?  Why, the excursion aint till tomorrow!”

I said “What excursion?” before I thought.