and.

Besides all these priceless treasures, there was an old boat lying
afloat in a small lagoon back of the house, one of those seepage pools
common to the coast--a boat which Fogarty had patched with a bit of
sail-cloth, and for which he had made two pairs of oars, one for each
of the "crew," as he called the lads, and which Archie learned to
handle with such dexterity that the old fisherman declared he would
make a first-class boatman when he grew up, and would "shame the whole
bunch of 'em."

But these two valiant buccaneers were not to remain in undisturbed
possession of the Bandit's Home with its bewildering fittings and
enchanting possibilities--not for long. The secret of the uses to which
the stranded craft bad been put, and the attendant fun which Commodore
Tod and his dauntless henchman, Archibald Cobden, Esquire, were daily
getting out of its battered timbers, had already become public
property. The youth of Barnegat--the very young youth, ranging from
nine to twelve, and all boys--received the news at first with hilarious
joy. This feeling soon gave way to unsuppressed indignation, followed
by an active bitterness, when they realized in solemn conclave--the
meeting was held in an open lot on Saturday morning--that the capture
of the craft had been accomplished, not by dwellers under Barnegat
Light, to whom every piece of sea-drift from a tomato-can to a
full-rigged ship rightfully belonged, but by a couple of aliens, one of
whom wore knee-pants and a white collar,--a distinction in dress highly
obnoxious to these lords of the soil.

All these denizens of Barnegat had at one time or another climbed up
the sloop's chains and peered down the hatchway to the sand covering
the keelson, and most of them had used it as a shelter behind which, in
swimming-time, they had put on or peeled off such mutilated rags as
covered their nakedness, but no one of them had yet conceived the idea
of turning it into a Bandit's Home. That touch of the ideal, that
gilding of the commonplace, had been reserved for the brain of the
curly-haired boy who, with dancing eyes, his sturdy little legs resting
on Tod's shoulder, had peered over the battered rail, and who, with a
burst of enthusiasm, had shouted: "Oh, cracky! isn't it nice, Tod! It's
got a place we can fix up for a robbers' den; and we'll be bandits and
have a flag. Oh, come up here! You never saw anything so fine," etc.,
etc.

When, therefore, Scootsy Mulligan, aged ni