k you ever told us about that."

"That was the time we went broke at Nashville, Tennessee. We missed our
checks, in some unaccountable way, yet we had our heads with us, and we
rode the Cumberland and Ohio rivers down to the Mississippi at Cairo,
in a houseboat of our own construction."

The speaker, George Fremont, a slender boy of seventeen, with spirited
black eyes and a resolute face, sat back in his chair and laughed at
the memory of that impecunious time, while the others gathered closer
about him.

Fremont was ostensibly in the employ of James Cameron, the wealthy
speculator, but was regarded by that worthy gentleman as an adopted son
rather than merely as a worker in his office force. Seven years
before, Mr. Cameron had become interested in the bright-faced newsboy,
and had taken him into his own home, where he had since been treated as
a member of the family.

"Went broke in the South, did you?" asked one of the group gathered
before an open grate fire in the luxuriously furnished clubroom of the
Black Bear Patrol, in the upper portion of a handsome uptown residence,
in the city of New York. "Go on and tell us about it! What's the
matter with the Tennessee river, or the Rio Grande?"

"If you had no money, how did you get your houseboat?" asked another
member of the group. "Houseboats don't grow on bushes down there, do
they?"

"Oh, we had a little money," George Fremont replied, "but not enough to
take us to Chicago in Pullman coaches. The joint purse was somewhere
about $10. We built the houseboat ourselves, of course."

"Must have been a strange experience, going broke like that!" one of
the others said. "Hurry up and tell us about it! I believe it does a
fellow good, once in a while, to get where he's got to hustle for
himself or go hungry!" he added, glancing at the others for
appreciation of the sentiment.

"I suppose it does seem funny for some other fellow to be broke in a
desolate land," said another voice, "but it isn't so funny right there
on the spot. Little Old New York looked a long way off when we were in
Nashville!"

The speaker, a boy of sixteen, short, and heavily built, left a window
from which he had been looking out on a wild March night and joined the
group before the fire. This was Frank Shaw, familiarly known to his
friends of the Black Bear Patrol, Boy Scouts of America, as "Fatty"
Shaw. He was the only son of a wealthy newspaper owner of the big
city, and in train