From the morning Joe Wayring and his friends left Ogden up to the time they wheeled over the old familiar road that led into Mount Airy, not a single thing happened to mar the pleasure of their trip. I do not mean to say that the roads were always good, or that they were never weather-bound; for those petty annoyances fall to the lot of every tourist, he expects them, and knows how to make the best of them. But they found no more train-wreckers along the route, nor were there any Buster bands or Matt Coyles to be afraid of. They spent many a night in camp; their pocket rifles brought them all the young squirrels they cared to eat; they encountered tramps on nearly every mile of the way, and although they never had the least trouble with these social outcasts, they listened to a story from the lips of two of them that interested
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 them exceedingly, and proved to Roy Sheldon's entire satisfaction that the clear-sighted Joe Wayring had hit pretty close to the mark when he declared that Roy's presence aboard the White Squall had not been brought about by accident.
Their destination was Plymouth, a little sea-port town situated on a bay of the same name. They spent a day roaming about the wharves, looking at everything there was to be seen, especially the ships, which would hardly have attracted more than a passing notice from them, had it not been for Roy's experience in New London harbor. They went aboard of one, looked all over it, marveled at its strength and more at the power of the winds and waves which could so easily make a wreck of man's best handiwork. They turned up their noses at the dingy forecastle, smelling of tar and bilgewater, and wondered how any one could bring himself to bunk in it during a long voyage.
"I would much rather sleep on a bed of hemlock boughs," said Joe, "and go out in the morning and catch my own breakfast from the
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 sparkling waters of a lake or brook, and serve it up on a piece of clean bark. If I had been in love with the sea when I came here, I would be all over it now."
"It's rough, isn't it?" said Roy, as he and his companions went down the gang-plank to the wharf; and he trembled all over when he thought how near he had come to being carried to distant countries against his will. "The little I saw of a sailor's life while I was on the White Squall convinced me that the officers are more to be dreaded than the forecastle. They can be as brutal as they please when they are out of sight of land, and there's no law to touch them."
"There's law enough," answered Joe, "but the trouble is, a sailor man can't use it. Suppose he has the officers of his vessel arrested for cruelty while he has the rest of the crew at hand to prove it against them. They are put under bonds, but the case is postponed on one pretext or another, and while that is being done, how is Jack going to live? Of course the minute he gets ashore he makes haste to spend his wages, and when his last dollar is
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 gone what recourse has he but to ship for another voyage? Then the case is called, and there being no one to prosecute, the captain and his mates are discharged and go aboard their vessel to play the same game over again."
"That's about the way those light-ship men put it when I threatened to have Captain Jack punished for kidnapping me," said Roy. "That may be law, but it isn't justice. I wonder where the White Squall and Tony and Bob are now."
"I shouldn't think you would care," replied Arthur. "I know I shouldn't if I had been treated as you have."
"I don't much care what becomes of the ship and her officers, but I am sorry for the crew. I tell you that Tony and Bob were shanghaied the same as I was."
Becoming weary of Plymouth and its surroundings at last, the boys took the road again, this time with their faces turned toward Mount Airy. They went back by a different route, as they intended to do when they set out; but they had another reason for it now. Money
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 would not have hired them to return across the mountains and take their chances of capture by Matt Coyle and the Buster band. Now that they could think over their adventures with calmness, they were surprised at the ease with which they had slipped through those ruffians' fingers. They knew they couldn't do it again, and they would have gone home by rail rather than try the mountain route a second time. There was one thing about it, Arthur repeatedly declared: The man who wrote their guide-book must be posted so that he could warn wheelmen to keep away from Glen's Falls until the mischief-making squatter and his new allies had been arrested and lodged in jail.
On the afternoon of the second day after leaving Plymouth, the boys came suddenly upon a couple of tramps who had halted under the shade of a tree by the road-side to eat the bread and meat they had begged at the nearest farmhouse. But these men were not like the other tramps they had seen. They were sailors on the face of them, and looked out of place there in the country so far from salt water. Roy Sheldon was sure there was something
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 familiar about them, and hardly knowing why he did so, he called out, as he moved past them, "Bob, Tony," whereupon the men jumped to their feet and stared hard at him without saying a word. They were evidently frightened, and would have taken to their heels if they had seen the least chance for escape.
"I declare, I believe they are Tony and Bob," said Roy, who was utterly amazed at the effect his words had produced upon the tramps; and turning about, he rode back to the tree under which they stood. "How in the name of all that's wonderful did you get stranded here?"
"Is—is it Rowe Shelly?" one of the men managed to ask.
"Yes, sir, they are Tony and Bob," exclaimed Roy, getting off his wheel and nodding at his companions. "Dusty as they are, I know them. What's the matter?" he added, as the men began backing away as if they did not want him to come any nearer. "You are not afraid of me, are you? I am not a ghost, and neither am I Rowe Shelly, although my name sounds somewhat like his, and I have
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 been told that I look like him. I am a different boy altogether. Now let's have the straight of this thing before we go any farther. I saw you carried to sea on the White Squall. How did you escape from her, and where is she now?"
"At the bottom of the ocean," replied one of the men; and the boys thought from the way he spoke he was glad to be able to say it.
"At the bottom of—" began Roy, incredulously. "Serves her just right. She had no business to—but everything goes to show that you took me aboard of her on purpose to have me kidnapped. What have you to say about it? Sit down and eat your dinner. You can talk just as well, and you act as though you were very hungry."
"So we are, sir," said the one whom Roy had picked out, and who he afterward addressed as Tony. "We never done such a thing before, sir, but we had to come to it. It's no use trying to hide the truth any longer, for it has come out on us. Yes, sir; me and Bob did take you aboard that ship on purpose."
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"There, now," cried Joe, indignantly, while Arthur Hastings looked and acted as though he wanted to light.
"But what object did you have in doing it?" continued Roy. "Who put you up to it—Willis?"
"He's the very chap, sir: but we've been punished for it, and we hope—"
"You've nothing whatever to fear from me, if that is what you want to say," interposed Roy, who was impatient to get at the bottom of what was to him a deep mystery. "You know how I got away, and here I am, safe and sound. Your actions proved that you did not think you were going to be shanghaied yourselves—what are you looking for?"
"You're right we didn't know it, sir," answered Tony, who pulled out his ditty-bag, and after a little fumbling in it drew forth a piece of soiled paper which he handed to Roy. "That, sir, is the letter I took to Cap'n Jack that night. If I had only known what was writ onto it, me and Bob would have kept clear of that ship, you may be sare. The cap'n dropped it on deck shortly after you went
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 overboard, and I made bold to pick it up without saying a word to him about it. I thought it would come handy some day. Read it for yourself, sir, and you will see that me and Bob was innocent of any intention of doing the least harm to you, sir."
"Didn't you know that I was going to be kidnapped?" exclaimed Roy, almost fiercely. "You did. Everything goes to prove it; but you thought you could get me into trouble and slip off the ship without getting into trouble yourselves."
"Not a bit of it, sir," said Tony, with so much earnestness that Roy was almost ready to believe him. "Read that paper, and then I will tell you just what was said and done in my house on the beach while you was fast asleep up-stairs."
The letter, which bore neither date nor signature, ran as follows:
"Captain Jack Rowan:—Knowing that you have been delayed nearly three weeks waiting for a crew, I send you three men who, I think, will be of use to you. Two of them used to be sailors, but the other is green and will have to be broken in. Ask no questions, but take them along.
A Friend."
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Roy Sheldon was so surprised that he could not speak again immediately. He leaned his wheel against the tree, looked first at Tony and then at his friends, and finally sat down on a convenient bowlder.
"Seems to me that there letter clears me and Bob of everything except taking you aboard the White Squall when we didn't want to do it," said Tony, after a pause. "We was as innocent as babbies of what happened afterwards."
"If you didn't want to do it what made you?" demanded Joe.
This brought Tony to the story he had to tell; and as I believe I can make it clearer to you than he did to Joe and his friends, I will tell it in my own language.
Rowe Shelly's guardian, who was fond of the water, kept a swift sailing-vessel as well as a steam yacht, and Tony and Bob Bradley belonged to it. The colonel furnished them a house, gave them regular employment during the yachting season, and in the winter time permitted them to make what money they could by shooting water-fowl at the lower end of the
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 island for the New London markets. They knew nothing whatever of the colonel's private affairs. They had heard a good many rumors.
"I want to say a word right there," interrupted Roy. "Where did those rumors come from?"
The boys had seated themselves on the ground on each side of the sailors, who ate their dinner as they talked. Tony acted as spokesman, but his brother jogged his memory with a word now and then. The former could not say where the rumors came from, but the mischief was all done by an old sailor, who settled on one of the uninhabited islands in the harbor and went to fishing for a livelihood. Rowe Shelly chanced to run athwart his hawse one day while sailing about in his boat. He talked with the old fellow for more than two hours, and when he came home he exploded a bomb-shell in his guardian's ear. In other words, he told the colonel that there was no relationship between them; that he had no business with the money he was squandering; that his father had not been lost at sea, as the colonel affirmed; that he was still alive, and
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 so was his mother; that they lived in Chelsea, Maryland; and that he was going to them as soon as he could get off the island.
"I know that was a sassy way for him to talk to the man who had always been so good to him, seeing that he hadn't no better evidence than an old sailor-man's unsupported word to back him up," said Tony, "but the way the colonel acted satisfied Rowe at once that there was more'n a grain of truth in what he had heard. The first thing he done was to take away the boy's boat, and shut him up on the island as close as if it had been a jail, and his second, to get rid of the fisherman. How he done it nobody seems to know; but he wasn't never seen again, nuther by Rowe Shelly nor nobody else. But the mischief had been done, and the first thing we know............