ng for a rainy day besides? If he could get the contract, and
his father and Dan would only abandon their lazy, worthless mode of
life and go to work, how happy they would all be!

"What's the matter?" asked Don, for David's face became clouded again
when he thought of his father and Dan.

"There's a good deal the matter," replied David, "but it is nothing I
can help."

"You don't act like yourself at all to-day," continued Don. "Suppose
you go home and take a rest. Don't brood over your troubles, whatever
they are. Let them go, if you can't help them. Think about pleasant
things, and to-morrow you will come up here, feeling like a new boy.
Bert and I will set the traps we have made this morning, and then
we'll go up and take a look at our bear trap."

David thought it would be a good plan to follow this advice, so he
closed the door of the shop to keep the pointer from following him,
and started for home.

"Well," said Bert, as he picked up his knife and resumed work upon
the figure four he was making, "Dave has seen his father!"

"And had trouble with him, too," added Don.

"It was about the pointer," said Bert.

"My idea exactly. Godfrey is hiding somewhere in the cane; Dan wanted
to make a little more money without work, so he stole the pointer
and gave him to his father to keep until I offered a reward for him.
David found it out, and to save me from being swindled, he recovered
the pointer and got himself into difficulty by it."

The boys, who were merely guessing at all this, would have been
surprised to know that their surmises were all correct. David and his
troubles, and his manful efforts to better his condition in spite of
his adverse circumstances, afforded them topics of conversation while
they were at work; and when the figure four, on which Bert was
employed, was completed, the mule was harnessed to the wagon, and the
boys drove off to set the half a dozen new traps they had built that
morning. It was twelve o'clock when they returned, and they found
lunch waiting for them. When they had done ample justice to it, they
began making hasty preparations for their visit to the island, and a
quarter of an hour more saw them well on their way up the bayou.

They found to their great delight that the ducks were beginning to
come in now, and Don was kept busy rowing from one side of the bayou
to the other to pick up the dead and wounded birds that Bert brought
out of the numerous flocks which took win