The Boy Aviators' Flight for a Fortune

ON BRIG ISLAND. The sharp bow of Zenas Daniels’ green and red dory grazed the yellow beach on the west shore of Brig Island, a wooded patch of land lying about a mile off the Maine Shore in the vicinity of Casco Bay. His son Zeb, a lumbering, uncouth-looking lad of about eighteen, with a pronounced squint, leaped from the craft as it was beached, and seized hold of the frayed painter preparatory to dragging her farther up the beach. In the meantime Zenas himself, brown and hatchetlike of face, and lean of figure—with a tuft of gray whisker on his sharp chin, like an old-fashioned knocker on a mahogany door—gathered up a pile of lobster pots from the stern of the dory and shouldered them. A few lay loose, and those he flung out on the beach. These last Zeb gathered up, and as his father stepped out of the dory the pair began trudging up the steeply sloping beach, toward the woods which rimmed the islet almost to the water’s edge. All this, seemingly, in defiance of a staring sign which faced them, for on it was printed in letters visible quite a distance off: PRIVATE PROPERTY