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 nine, son of a ship-caulker who worked in Martin Farguson's ship-yard, and Sandy Plummer, eldest of three, and their mother a widow--plain washing and ironing, two doors from the cake-shop--heard that that French "spad," Arch Cobden what lived up to Yardley, and that red-headed Irish cub, Tod Fogarty--Tod's hair had turned very red--had pre-empted the Black Tub, as the wreck was irreverently called, claiming it as their very own, "and-a-sayin' they wuz pirates and bloody Turks and sich," these two quarrelsome town rats organized a posse in lower Barnegat for its recapture.
Archie was sweeping the horizon from his perch on the "poop-deck" when his eagle eye detected a strange group of what appeared to be human beings advancing toward the wreck from the direction of Barnegat village.

One, evidently a chief, was in the lead, the others following bunched together.

All were gesticulating wildly.

The trusty henchman immediately gave warning to Tod, who was at work in the lower hold arranging a bundle of bean-poles which had drifted inshore the night before--part of the deck-load, doubtless, of some passing vessel.
"Ay, ay, sir!" cried the henchman with a hoist of his knee-pants, as a prelude to his announcement.
"Ay, ay, yerself!" rumbled back the reply.