CHAPTER I. A PRINCE AND PRINCESS GO IN SEARCH OF ADVENTURES.

Twelve-year-old Arthur Dale Dustin did not look the least bit like a Prince, sitting perched on the topmost rail of the zig-zag fence that bright September afternoon. As he dangled his bare brown legs idly, he wistfully watched his cousins at the play in which they would not allow him to join. He loved to play as dearly as any other boy; but somehow or other he was always left out of their games by the boisterous crew of little Dustins whom he called cousins. He tried his best to like what they liked, 2and to be one with them; but something always seemed to happen to prevent.

Once when they all went to see the well that his uncle, John Dustin, was drilling, deep down into the ground, with the hope of striking petroleum, they found the men away, and, for a few minutes, had the place to themselves. Thereupon Cousin Dick, who was two years older than Arthur, climbed up the derrick, and, watching his chance, sprang on the end of the great walking beam, that was working slowly up and down with ponderous strokes. Here he rode on the back of his mighty wooden steed for a few seconds, while the other children shouted and clapped their hands with admiration.

Then Dick came down and dared Arthur to perform the same feat; but the boy held back. He was not afraid, not a bit of it; and even if he had been he would gladly have done anything Dick dared do, merely to win his good-will and that of the others. But his Uncle John had forbidden them even to go near the derrick or the engine unless he was there to look after them. The others seemed to have forgotten this; but Arthur remembered it, and so refused to ride on the walking beam because it 3would be an act of disobedience. Then Cousin Dick sneered at him, and called him a “’Fraid-cat,” and all the others, except tender-hearted, freckle-faced little Cynthia, took up the cry and shouted, “’Fraid-cat! ’Fraid-cat!” as they crowded around him and pushed him into the derrick.

Just then Uncle John returned and the others ran away, leaving poor Arthur, looking very confused and red in the face, standing in the middle of the derrick floor. Then, when his uncle in a stern voice asked him what he was doing in that place which he had been strictly forbidden to enter, Arthur hung his head and would not say anything; for he was too brave a lad to be a “tell-tale,” and too honest to tell a lie. So his Uncle John said that he was a naughty boy who had led the other children into mischief, and that he might go right home and get into bed, and stay there for the rest of the day as a punishment.

Poor Arthur obeyed; and, as he walked slowly toward the only place in the world he could call his home, great tears rolled down his cheeks. When the other children, who were hiding in the bushes, saw them they called out, “Cry-baby! Cry-baby!” 4Only little Cynthia ran out and put her arm about his neck and said she was sorry; but Dick pulled her roughly away.

Another time when Cynthia asked Arthur to build a house for her dolls, under the roots of a great tree that had blown down just on the edge of the woods back of the house, he, being an obliging little soul, consented at once to do so. Under the huge mass of roots and earth they played happily enough at making believe it was a cave, and Cynthia was radiant with delight over the beautiful time they were having. For a little while Arthur experienced the novel feeling of being perfectly happy. Then, all of a sudden, a shower of earth and gravel came rattling down on them from above, and with it came a mocking chorus of “Girl-boy! Girl-boy! Look at the girl-boy playing with dolls!” and little Cynthia began to cry over the ruin of her beautiful baby-house.

PRINCE DUSTY AND CYNTHIA SET OUT ON THEIR ADVENTURES. (Page 5.)

5Upon this, with a quick blaze of indignation, Arthur picked up a bit of stick and flung it with all his strength at the tormentors who had brought tears to his little cousin’s eyes. It was aimed at nobody in particular; but it happened to strike Dick on the cheek and make a slight cut, from which the blood flowed. Thereupon the big boy ran crying home to his mother, and told her that Arthur had struck him with a stick, in proof of which story he showed his bloody face. Then Mrs. Dustin, who always acted upon the impulse of the moment, took down the apple switch from over the mantel-piece and gave her nephew a whipping, which she said would be a lesson to him. Poor little Cynthia tried to explain how it had all happened; but her mother had no time to listen, and only told her and the other children to come away from the bad boy, and not go near him again that day.

Some days after this, when all the others had gone on a fishing expedition, upon which they had refused to let Arthur and Cynthia accompany them, the boy proposed a beautiful plan to his little cousin. He remembered the fairy tales his own dear mother used to read to him, and now he said:

“Let us make believe we are a Prince and Princess, Cynthia, and go out into the world in search of adventures.”

Cynthia had not the remotest idea of what was meant by “adventures”; but she was willing to agree to anything that Arthur might propose.

6So the two children set forth, and nobody noticed them as they went out of the front gate and walked, hand in hand, down the dusty road.

They had not gone far before they discovered a poor little robin just learning to fly, that had fallen into a ditch by the roadside, where in a few moments more he would have been drowned. Of course they rescued him, and, while the old mother and father birds flew about them uttering cries of distress and begging them not to hurt their baby, Cynthia dried his wings and carefully wiped the mud from his downy feathers with her pinafore. Then Arthur climbed over a fence and gently placed the little trembling thing down in the soft grass on the other side.

Next they found a yellow butterfly, whose pretty wings were all tangled in a spider’s web. Of course they set him free, and had the pleasure of seeing him flutter joyously away. Arthur said these were beautiful adventures, and both the children looked eagerly forward to finding some more; but they walked nearly a mile, and were becoming very hot and tired, before they met with another.

All of a sudden, as they were passing a cottage by 7the roadside, they were startled by a deep, loud bark, and turning they saw a big Newfoundland dog bound over the front fence, and come dashing directly toward them. Now, while Arthur was very fond of dogs that he was acquainted with, he was also very much afraid of strange dogs, especially big ones; and his first impulse upon this occasion was to run away. Then he remembered that he was a Prince, and that princes were always brave. So he told Cynthia to run as fast as she could, and hide in the bushes. As she did this the brave little fellow turned a bold front, though he was trembling in every limb, toward the enemy. The next instant the big dog sprang upon him, threw him down, rolled him in the dust, and then stood over him wagging a bushy tail, and barking with delight at what he had done.

CHAPTER II. A PRESENT FROM A FAIRY GODMOTHER.

Arthur, who thought he was certainly to be killed, shut his eyes, and for nearly a minute lay perfectly still. He opened them on hearing a trampling of hoofs, a jingling of harness, and a loud “Whoa.” Then, no longer seeing the dog, he quickly scrambled to his feet. He was right under the noses of a pair of splendid horses, and behind them was a fine carriage, from which a beautiful lady was just stepping.

“Why, little boy,” she said, as she took Arthur’s hand and led him away from in front of the horses, “don’t you know that you came very near being run over? and that it is dangerous to be playing out here in the middle of the road? Now run into the house, and ask your mother to brush your clothes, and don’t ever do so again.”

PRINCE DUSTY AND HIS FAIRY GODMOTHER. (Page 8.)

9“But I don’t live here,” said Arthur, lifting his dust-covered little face to the gracious one bent down to him. “I live a long way off, and I’m a Prince, and Cynthia is a Princess, and we were looking for adventures, when a big dog knocked me down; but he didn’t hurt Cynthia, because I defended her, the same as princes do in the stories my own mamma used to read to me.”

“So you are a Prince, are you?” laughed the lady; “then you must be ‘Prince Dusty.’ Well, if you will get into my carriage, and show me the way, I will take you home to your castle. But where is your Princess? What did you say her name was?”

“It is Cynthia,” replied Arthur, “and there she comes now.”

As he spoke, poor, terrified little Cynthia came timidly out from the bushes where she had been hiding, and crying with fright, for the last three minutes.

Then the beautiful lady took them both into her carriage, and ordered the coachman to drive on, while she soothed and comforted the children, and wiped Arthur’s dusty face with her own embroidered handkerchief.

10She looked curiously at him when he told her that his name was Arthur Dale Dustin, that his dearest mamma and papa were dead, and that he used to live in New York, but that now he lived with Cynthia’s father and mother, who were his Uncle John and Aunt Nancy. She asked him several questions about himself; but always seemed to forget his name and only called him “Prince Dusty.”

When they reached the Dustin house she kissed both the children good-bye, and gave Arthur a beautiful copy of Hans Christian Andersen’s “Fairy Tales,” that she had in the carriage with her. On the fly-leaf she wrote, with a tiny gold pencil that hung from her watch-chain: “To Prince Dusty from his Fairy Godmother.” Then she said she must hurry on, and drove away, leaving the children standing by the roadside and staring after the carriage so long as the faintest cloud of dust from its wheels was visible.

As they turned slowly into the front gate, and walked toward the house, Arthur drew a long breath and said: “Cynthia, that is the very most beautiful adventure I ever heard of. It’s beautifuller even than the stories my own mamma used to 11tell, and I’ve got this lovely book to show that it is all true.”

Poor Arthur was not allowed to enjoy the possession of his book very long, for his Aunt Nancy, who had been alarmed at the children’s disappearance, and now gave them only bread and water for their dinner, took it from him, and laid it on a high shelf, saying that it was altogether too handsome a book for a little boy to have.

Arthur begged, and pleaded with tears in his eyes, that he might be allowed to keep his book, claiming justly that it was his very own, and had been given to him to do as he pleased with; but all to no purpose. His Aunt Nancy only said that she would give it to him when the proper time came; and then, adding that she was too busy now to be bothered with him, she bade him get out of the house, and not let her see him again before sundown.

So the sensitive little chap walked slowly away, trying in vain to choke back the indignant sobs that would persist in making themselves heard, and feeling very bitterly the injustice of his Aunt Nancy’s action. He longed for sympathy in this time of trial, and for some friendly ear into which he might 12pour his griefs. Even Cynthia’s company was denied him, for she was seated in the kitchen under her mother’s watchful eye, taking slow, awkward stitches in the patchwork, a square of which was her allotted task for each day.

“I’ll find Uncle Phin,” said Arthur to himself, “and tell him all about it, and perhaps he will somehow find a way to get my book again, and then I’ll ask him to take me away from here, to some place where I can keep it always.”

Somewhat cheered by having a definite purpose in view, the forlorn little fellow started across the fields toward a distant wood-lot, in which he knew his sympathizing old friend and adviser was at work.

Uncle Phin was a white-headed, simple-hearted, old negro, who, some years before, had been a slave belonging to Colonel Arthur Dale, of Dalecourt, Virginia. He had been the constant attendant, in her daily horseback rides, of the Colonel’s only daughter, the lovely Virginia Dale, to whom her father had formally presented him, as a birthday gift, when she was fifteen years old.

Three years later the spirited girl, refusing to marry the man whom her father had selected for her, 13ran away with Richard Dustin, a young Northerner recently graduated from a New England university, who had accepted a professorship in one of the Virginia colleges. This marriage proved so terrible a disappointment to her father that, in his anger, he declared he would never receive a communication from her, nor see her again, and he never did. The young couple, accompanied by the faithful Uncle Phin, went to New York. There their only child, a boy, named Arthur Dale after the grandfather who refused to recognize him, was born, and there they lived in the greatest happiness until the child was nearly eleven years old. Then the beautiful young mother died, leaving Richard Dustin utterly heartbroken. Soon afterward he removed with his idolized boy and Uncle Phin, who had filled the position of nurse and constant protector to Arthur from infancy, to the home of his childhood, a little rocky farm in Northwestern Pennsylvania.

He had but one relative in the world, a brother, who lived near one of the mushroom-like towns that sprang up during the early days of petroleum. When, a year after the death of his wife, Richard Dustin was also laid in the grave, it was in the 14family of this brother, John Dustin, that Arthur and Uncle Phin found a home.

Richard Dustin left no property save the rocky farm that was too poor even to support a mortgage. As his brother John had a large family, the new burdens now thrust upon him were not very warmly welcomed. In fact Mrs. Dustin strongly urged her husband not to receive them. She was Arthur’s Aunt Nancy, a hard, unsympathetic, overworked woman, who grudged every morsel of food that the new-comers ate, and seemed to consider that everything given to Arthur was just so much stolen from her own children.

Uncle Phin, it is true, worked faithfully to do what he could toward earning the bread eaten by himself and his “lil Marse,” as he persisted in calling Arthur, but he was old and feeble, and the best that he could do did not amount to much. The scanty, but neat, city-made wardrobe that Arthur brought with him to his new home, had not been replenished by a single garment, and now the boy’s clothes were shabby and outgrown to such a degree, that his mother’s heart would have ached could she have seen him.

15Although he was a thoughtful, imaginative child, he was remarkably strong and active for his age. He had learned to read and write at his mother’s knee, and his father had, during the last year of his life, found his only pleasure in planning and directing the boy’s education. Arthur was therefore as far in advance of his cousins in this respect as he was in refinement and ideas of honor. He was so very different from them that, though he tried hard to love them and make them love him, they, with the exception of little Cynthia, to whom he was an ideal of perfection, united in cordially disliking him.

This dislike was clearly shown, and resulted in many a heartache and many an unjust punishment to the lonely orphan boy. Many a night he slipped from his little cot bed in the back shed, and creeping to where Uncle Phin slept on a hay-mow in the barn, poured his troubles with bitter tears into the sympathetic ears of the old negro.

Then the faithful soul would open wide his arms, and nestling the fair head of his “lil Marse” against his broad bosom, would soothe and comfort him with gentle croonings and quaint quavering plantation melodies. His singing was always accompanied 16by a slow rocking motion of the body, and finally the blue, tear-swollen eyes would close, and the boy would drop into a sleep full of beautiful dreams, in which he always saw his own dear father and mother. Then Uncle Phin’s frosted head would droop lower and lower, until he too was asleep and dreaming of his long ago cabin home under the magnolia trees of old Virginia. Thus these two would comfort each other until morning.

Now, choking with a sense of injustice and wrong at the hands of his Aunt Nancy, little Prince Dusty fled across the fields in search of this friend. He was filled with the determination to beg Uncle Phin to take him away from that hated place, to some other where they might live happily together for always and always.

CHAPTER III. BRACE BARLOW THE MOONLIGHTER.

Besides Uncle Phin and Cynthia, Arthur had one other friend whom he seldom saw now, but whom he was always glad to meet. This was Brace Barlow, a stalwart, good-natured, young fellow, about twenty-five years old, who seemed so big and strong to the little boy, that the latter called him his “dear giant.” He worked for Arthur’s uncle when the boy first came to live with the Dustins, and had immediately taken a great fancy to the gentle little fellow. He taught Arthur to ride horseback, to drive a team, and to swim, and was always ready to tell him stories of adventures in the oil region. Besides these things, he took pains patiently to explain where the oil came from, and how wells were drilled, deep down into the earth to its hiding-places.

18Some months before the time with which this story opens, Brace Barlow left Mr. Dustin’s employ, and, much to Arthur’s dismay, became a “moonlighter.”

Now to understand what a “moonlighter” is, one must know at least as much as Arthur did about oil wells. They are holes about the size of an ordinary stove-pipe, bored, by means of immensely heavy iron drills, hundreds and sometimes thousands of feet into the earth, until they reach the layer of porous sandstone that holds the oil, just as a sponge holds water.

With the oil in this sandstone are vast quantities of gas, that exert an enormous pressure upon it; and the moment an opening is made to where it is, this gas forces the oil to the surface, often driving it forth in great spurts and fountain-like jets. Such a well is called a “gusher,” and from it the oil flows for days, weeks, and sometimes for years. After a while, however, the supply of oil or gas, or both, becomes exhausted, so that the stream no longer rises above the mouth of the well. Then a pump is used, and by means of it the oil is pumped up, just as water is from an ordinary well. But the supply 19of oil always decreases, until, by and by, the pump no longer brings it up in paying quantities.

For some years after the discovery of oil, these exhausted wells were abandoned, and their owners sunk new ones in other places. At length, however, a wise man who had studied the situation very carefully, concluded that if, by any means, the oil-bearing rock could be shattered for a considerable distance around the bottom of these old wells, the flow of oil might be increased, and it might again be produced from them in paying quantities. So he invented a torpedo that could be exploded at any required depth in a well. It was simply a long tin tube, closed at the lower end, and filled with nitro-glycerine. This is one of the most terrible explosives ever discovered; and though it is only ordinary sweet glycerine, such as is used for chapped faces and hands, mixed with nitric acid, it is ten times more powerful than gunpowder, and explodes upon receiving a very slight shock or blow.