Chapter 21

BAD NEWS.

So sunshine follows storm!

It was a jolly party aboard the _Merry Seas_, as she bowled along on her way from New Haven to New York. It was composed of Frank Merriwell and a number of his intimate friends; and wherever Frank and his friends were, Dull Care usually hid his agued face and gave place to smiling Pleasure.

"That grumbling old boatman at the New Haven wharf was a liar!" groaned Dismal Jones, as if it were a grief that he had not found the boatman's unpleasant prognostications true.

"What did he say?" asked Danny Griswold, who had been prancing the deck like a diminutive admiral, stopping now and blowing a cloud of cigarette smoke from his nostrils.

"He said that a smoker of cigarettes is always a measly runt!" grunted Bruce Browning, from the big chair in which he had ensconced himself almost as soon as he came aboard, and which he had hardly left since.

"You're another!" said Danny. "He didn't say anything of the kind."

"He was a poet," said Dismal, "and he threw his comment into rime. I was taken in by him, I suppose, because he seemed to be half-way quoting Scripture:

"'The Pharisees were hypocrites, And the _Merry Seas_ is a ship o' fits!'"

"A ship o' fits? Nothing eccentric about this steamer, so far as I can see!"

"Except Danny Griswold!" exclaimed Bink Stubbs. "He is enough to give anything fits."

"Something your tailor is never able to give you!" Danny retorted.

"Sit down!" growled Browning. "You are shutting out the view!"

"What view?" Danny demanded.

"The view of the steamer's funnel. I'd rather look at that. It can smoke and keep still--and you can't."

Inza and Elsie came along, accompanied by Merriwell and Bart Hodge. Winnie Lee, who was at present under her father's displeasure for her persistence in continuing to encourage Buck Badger, was not aboard, but Amy May was a member of the party. At the moment, she was conversing gaily with Bernard Burrage, Inza's semi-invalid father, on the forward-deck.

"We're going to have a fog!" said Merriwell, speaking to Bruce and those near. "I have been hoping it would hold off until we reach New York, but it isn't going to."

"I'd rather be in a ship that has fits now and then, than to be stuck in a fog-bank!" Bink declared. "I guess that New Haven boatman was a prophet, after all."

The _Merry Seas_ was a steamer running on a somewhat irregular schedule to New Haven and New London, and back to the great metropolis by the sea route along the ocean side of Long Island, touching at one or two Long Island points.

Merriwell's friends had decided on a steamer voyage to New York and back as a change from the usual work and athletics at Yale. Not that they were tired of either. But nothing of signal importance was on the program to detain them in New Haven, and they were away, therefore, for this short trip by boat.

The ordinary Sound route between New Haven and New York was familiar ground to every member of the party, and something new was desired. Hence they had taken the _Merry Seas_, which had steamed to New London, and out to sea between Block Island and Montauk Point, and had then laid her course down the Long Island coast for New York harbor.

Inza laughed at Bink's lugubrious declaration. Gamp was laughing, too.

"If we get stuck in a fog, we can have Joe Gamp yell a few times for us. That will do for a fog-horn."

"Then the _Merry Seas_ will have fits, sure enough!" said Bink.

Gamp looked serious.

"Well, honest, now, that dud-dud-don't sus-sound so funny to mum-me as it dud-does to you. Owned a cuc-cuc-carf once, that was pup-prancing raound in the med-der pup-pup-pasture, and I gug-got so tickled that I just sus-set daown and hollered. Goshfry! you wouldn't believe it, bub-bub-but that cuc-carf fell over dead's a stun wall!"

"Gave it heart-disease, of course!" Bink gravely observed. "Not to be wondered at."

"I'm just tut-tut-telling this story as a warning tut-to you!" Joe solemnly observed. "The hoss dud-dud-doctor said that the pup-poor thing's head was weak. Sus-so when we get into a fuf-fog and I begug-gin to holler, bub-bub-better pup-put cotton into your ears, Binky!"

Stubbs fell back into Danny's arms.

"Ar-r-r-r!" he gurgled. "I've got 'em now. Fits!"

"I'll give you fits, if you don't stop tumbling over against me!" Danny howled, giving Bink a push that landed him in Browning's lap. Everybody laughed, and Merriwell and his companions walked on round the steamer's rail.

"It hurts me to think that I must separate soon from all those jolly fellows!" Merry observed, in a saddened voice. "But commencement is rushing this way at railroad speed, and most of them will go out of Yale then forever."

"We'll not get blue about it until we have to," said Elsie, though the thought had saddened her more than once.

"Just see how the fog is coming down!" Inza observed.

"Hello!" cried Hodge, "another vessel!"

A steamer hove into view through the thickening mist. The boats began to sound their whistles.

"A sort of Flying Dutchman!" remarked Merriwell, and, indeed, the passing steamer did seem more a phantasm of the fog than a real vessel carrying living, breathing people. The _Merry Seas_ sounded her whistle at frequent intervals as she pushed on into the fog, and for some time after the steamer had vanished her hoarse whistle could also be heard.

"Hello!" cried Browning, who had been lazily looking over some late New York papers.

The tone and the change in his manner told that he had come on a startling piece of news.

"What is it?" Diamond asked.

"Maybe only the same name!" said Browning, and then read this paragraph from the telegraphic columns:

"A young Irishman named Barney Mulloy was attacked and killed by hoboes near Sea Cove, on the coast not far from Sandy Hook, yesterday morning. The object of the tramps was doubtless robbery, as Mulloy is known to have had a considerable sum of money on his person."

Browning looked up questioningly.

"Likely another fellow, though!" he said.

"By Jove! I'm afraid not!" exclaimed Frank, who had hastily taken the paper from Bruce, and was staring in consternation at the fateful item.

"There may be a hundred Barney Mulloys!" said Rattleton.

Frank shook his head.

"I had a letter from him a few days ago, and he was then stopping at Sea Cove. He was making money, too!"

Merriwell felt stunned. Barney Mulloy had been one of his dearest friends, faithful and honest, kind-hearted and true, jolly and hopeful. Through all of his hilarious experiences at Fardale, Frank had not a stancher adherent. And now Barney was dead, slain by a lot of miserable tramps! Tears of honest grief and indignation came into Frank's eyes.

"Barney Mulloy dead?" exclaimed Inza, coming up at that moment and hearing the news.

"What?" cried Elsie.

"Report in the _Herald_," Frank answered. "Killed yesterday by hoboes, somewhere below Sandy Hook."

Bad news spreads as if by magic. In a little while the other members of the party, having read the story for themselves or heard of it from others, gathered round Merriwell.

"Well, he was an honest boy," said Hodge, a noticeable tremor in his voice.

"A better-hearted lad never lived!" Merriwell asserted.

Frank's mind went back to Fardale, and, grieved as he was, he could again hear the yells of Barney Mulloy and Hans Dunnerwust, when they crawled into bed with the lobsters, which they thought were centipedes. It had been one of the funniest incidents of the Fardale days, for both thought they were poisoned by the bites of the creatures, and that they would surely die. The whole thing had been a practical joke, in which Frank had played a prominent part. And now Barney, the mischievous, the loyal, the reckless, was dead!

"I can hardly believe it!" Merry declared. "It doesn't seem possible. But there is one thing! I shall spend some money in having those hoboes hunted down and punished for their crime."

"I wish I could have happened along there about the time they jumped on him!" growled Hodge, and the light in his dark face showed that he would have done his best to make it hot for the hoboes if he could have put his hands on them. "Barney had the right kind of stuff in him."

This depressing bit of news took all the merriment and life out of the little party. And, as the steamer wallowed on through the increasing fog, the world seemed suddenly to have become wrapped in gloom.

"Wish we'd stayed in New Haven!" grunted Browning. "I'll have to smoke faster to keep warm, or go below."

"And I wish we were in New York," said Bink. "There is something there to warm up the blood."

Danny looked at him.

"Drinks? Likely the captain has a private bottle tucked away somewhere that he will give you a nip out of."

"Life, I mean. Pulsing streets, swarms of people, theaters, hand-organs----"

"Oh, yes, a monkey is usually lost away from a hand-organ!"

"I suppose that is why you always seem so lonesome! When Merry is sad, we all are--grumpy! New York would help to lift us out of the dumps."