"That's true enough! At least it proved so in our case.
That time in the South we had nothing worth mentioning
in our pockets, and yet we had the time of our lives."

"I don't think 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?"