"Hallo!" greeted Charley cheerfully. "What luck, Walt?"
"Too good," said the boy on the block listlessly. "Every turtle in the Atlantic must have tried to lay on the beach along here. Didn't even have the fun of looking for a nest. They were scattered around everywhere."
"And you, Captain?" asked Charley, with a grin at his chum's reply.
"Ran the skiff right up on a bed of oysters," the old sailor said briefly. "All I had to do was lean over the side and pick 'em up with my hand--big, nice, fat oysters, too."
Charley took a seat on a piece of driftwood, and silence fell upon the three. Only Chris, with the high spirits of his race, stamped down the fire into a bed of glowing coals, and prepared to make an omelette of the turtle eggs, a stew from the oysters, and a big pot of coffee, singing as he worked,
"Ham meat hit am good to eat, Bacon's berry fine, But gib, oh, gib me what I long for, Dat watermilen asmiling on de vine."
Charley broke the long silence that had fallen on the three. "We are getting to be three old grouches," he said calmly. "We have got the best of health. We have got $5,000 cash in the bank. We have been truckers, wreckers, pearl hunters, plume hunters, spongers, and, lastly, net fishermen, and have gone through all kinds of hardships and perils, and yet, after we agreed to take a long vacation trip and rest up, here after only two weeks of it we are getting restless and dissatisfied. Am I right?"
"You are," declared Walter Hazard heartily. "I admit it. I'm sick of loafing. I want to get back to real work again."
"It's all right for a while, this lounging about from place to place, but I reckon I've about got my fill of it," Captain Westfield admitted. "I had a heap sight rather be working at something."
"I feel the same way," Charley agreed, "and I believe I've found the very thing for us, but it's big--the biggest thing the Boy Chums ever tackled. Come on. Chris has got supper ready. We will talk it over while we eat."
FOR a few minutes there was entire silence while the four devoted their whole attention to the delicious meal Chris had prepared, and, during this lull, the reader has time to observe and note more carefully this little band of old friends, whom he has doubtless met amid many adventures in the Boy Chum Series. They have changed but little since he met them last in "The Young Net Fishermen." Charley West, the strapping young fellow, who now sits on one side of the fire eagerly devouring piping hot omelette and rich oyster stew, is the same old Charley of yore, his face a trifle older and more alert, perhaps, from the dangers and hardships through which he has passed, but with the same old merry twinkle in his eyes. Walter Hazard, now grown almost as husky as his chum, sits next to him, and close beside Walt is gray-haired Captain Westfield, a sort of guardian father to them both, a master of the sea, but rather helpless on land. He, too, is little changed, while Chris, the little ebony darkey, wears the same broad, good-natured smile as ever. But we must stop and listen to the conversation now starting up, for upon it depends the future of our four friends.