The Rival Campers; Or, The Adventures of Henry Burns
by Ruel Perley Smith · English · Gutenberg #40548 · 608,881 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Rival Campers; Or, The Adventures of Henry Burns
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: The Rival Campers; Or, The Adventures of Henry Burns
Author: Ruel Perley Smith
Illustrator: A. B. Shute
Release date: August 20, 2012 [eBook #40548]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/40548
Credits: Produced by Stephen Hutcheson, Rod Crawford, Dave Morgan
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RIVAL CAMPERS; OR, THE ADVENTURES OF HENRY BURNS ***
THE
RIVAL CAMPERS
Or,
THE ADVENTURES OF HENRY BURNS
By
Ruel P. Smith
ILLUSTRATED BY
A. B. SHUTE
BOSTON
L. C. PAGE & COMPANY
1905
_Copyright_, _1905_
By L. C. Page & Company
(INCORPORATED)
_All rights reserved_
Published July, 1905
_Second Impression_
_Third Impression, July, 1906_
_COLONIAL PRESS
Electrotyped and Printed by C. H. Simonds & Co.
Boston. U. S. A._
WITH LOVE TO
_Ruel Stevenson Smith_
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. The Camp 1
II. To the Rescue 17
III. A Surprise 32
IV. A Night with Henry Burns 51
V. A Hidden Cave 72
VI. Jack Harvey Investigates 90
VII. Squire Brackett’s Dog 109
VIII. The Haunted House 125
IX. Setting a Trap 142
X. A Midnight Adventure 160
XI. An Unpleasant Discovery 181
XII. A Cruise Around the Island 199
XIII. Storm Driven 220
XIV. The Man in the Boat 238
XV. Good for Evil 259
XVI. A Treaty of Friendship 278
XVII. The Fire 290
XVIII. The Flight 306
XIX. The Pursuit 324
XX. Among the Islands 343
XXI. The Trial 364
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
“‘Look, Bob! Look!’ he cried. ‘What have we done?’”
(_Frontispiece_) 86
“‘What’s the matter with you?’ roared the Colonel” 67
“‘You’re the worst one of all, Jack Harvey’” 114
“Craigie reeled under the blow and staggered back against the
wall” 173
“Boys and lobster-pot slumped into the sea” 211
“‘Will you shake hands with me?’ he asked” 279
THE RIVAL CAMPERS
CHAPTER I.
THE CAMP
On a certain afternoon in the latter part of the month of June, the
little fishing village of Southport, on Grand Island in Samoset Bay, was
awakened from its customary nap by the familiar whistle of the steamboat
from up the river. Southport, opening a sleepy eye at the sound, made
deliberate preparation to receive its daily visitor, knowing that the
steamer was as yet some distance up the island, and not even in sight,
for behind the bluff around which the steamer must eventually come the
town lay straggling irregularly along the shore of a deeply indented
cove.
A few loungers about the village grocery-store seemed roused to a renewed
interest in life, removed their pipes, and, with evident satisfaction at
this relief from island monotony, sauntered lazily down to the wharf. The
storekeeper and the freight-agent, as became men burdened with the
present responsibility of seeing that the steamer was offered all
possible assistance in making its landing, bustled about with importance.
Soon a wagon or two from down the island came rattling into the village,
while from the hotel, a quarter of a mile distant, a number of guests
appeared on the veranda, curious to scrutinize such new arrivals as might
appear. From the summer cottages here and there flags were hastily run
up, and from one a salute was fired; all of which might be taken to
indicate that the coming of the steamer was the event of the day at
Southport—as, indeed, it was.
Now another whistle sounded shrilly from just behind the bluff, and the
next moment the little steamer shoved its bow from out a jagged screen of
rock, while the chorused exclamation, “Thar she is!” from the assembled
villagers announced that they were fully awake to the situation.
Among the crowd gathered on the wharf, three boys, between whom there
existed sufficient family resemblance to indicate that they were
brothers, scanned eagerly the faces of the passengers as the steamer came
slowly to the landing. The eldest of the three, a boy of about sixteen
years, turned at length to the other two, and remarked, in a tone of
disappointment:
“They are not aboard. I can’t see a sign of them. Something must have
kept them.”
“Unless,” said one of the others, “they are hiding somewhere to surprise
us.”
“It’s impossible,” said the first boy, “for any one to hide away when he
gets in sight of this island. No, if they were aboard we should have seen
them the minute the steamer turned the bluff, waving to us and yelling at
the top of their lungs. There’s something in the air here that makes one
feel like tearing around and making a noise.”
“Especially at night, when the cottagers are asleep,” said the third boy.
“Besides,” continued the eldest, “their canoe is not aboard, and you
would not catch Tom Harris and Bob White coming down here for the summer
without it, when they spend half their time in it on the river at home
and are as expert at handling it as Indians,—and yet, they wrote that
they would be here to-day.”
It was evident the boys they were looking for were not aboard. The little
steamer, after a violent demonstration of puffing and snorting, during
which it made apparently several desperate attempts to rush headlong on
the rocks, but was checked with a hasty scrambling of paddle-wheels, and
was bawled at by captain and mates, was finally subdued and made fast to
the wharf by the deck-hands. The passengers disembarked, and the same
lusty, brown-armed crew, with a series of rushes, as though they feared
their captive might at any moment break its bonds and make a dash for
liberty, proceeded to unload the freight and baggage. Trucks laden with
leaning towers of baggage were trundled noisily ashore and overturned
upon the wharf.
In the midst of the bustle and commotion the group of three boys was
joined by another boy, who had just come from the hotel.
“Hulloa, there!” said the new boy. “Where’s Tom and Bob?”
“They are not aboard, Henry,” said the eldest boy of the group.
The new arrival gave a whistle of surprise.
“How do you feel this afternoon, Henry?” asked the second of the
brothers.
“Oh, very poorly—very miserable. In fact, I don’t seem to get any
better.”
This lugubrious reply, strange to say, did not evoke the sympathy which a
listener might have expected. The boys burst into roars of laughter.
“Poor Henry Burns!” exclaimed the eldest boy, giving the self-declared
invalid a blow on the chest that would have meant the annihilation of
weak lungs. “He will never be any better.”
“And he may be a great deal worse,” said the second boy, slapping the
other on the back so hard that the dust flew under the blow.
“Won’t the boys like him, though?” asked the third and youngest
boy,—“that is, if they ever come.”
Henry Burns received these sallies with the utmost unconcern. If he
enjoyed the effect which his remarks had produced, it was denoted only by
a twinkle in his eyes. He was rather a slender, pale-complexioned youth,
of fourteen years. A physiognomist might have found in his features an
unusual degree of coolness and self-control, united with an abnormal
fondness for mischief; but Henry Burns would have passed with the
ordinary person as a frail boy, fonder of books than of sports.
Just then the captain of the steamer put his head out of the pilot-house
and called to the eldest of the brothers:
“I’ve got a note for you, George Warren. A young chap who said he was on
his way here in a canoe came aboard at Millville and asked me to give it
to you; and there was another young chap in a canoe alongside who asked
me to say they’d be here to-night.”
“Hooray!” cried George Warren, opening and reading the note. “It’s the
boys, sure enough. They started at four o’clock this morning in the
canoe, and will be here to-night. Much obliged, Captain Chase.”
“Not a bit,” responded the captain. “But let me tell you boys something.
You needn’t look for these ’ere young chaps to-night, because they won’t
get here. What’s more,” added the captain, as he surveyed the water and
sky with the air of one defying the elements to withhold a secret from
him, “if they try to cross the bay to-night you needn’t look for them at
all. The bay is nothing too smooth now; but wait till the tide turns and
the wind in those clouds off to the east is let loose! There’s going to
be fun out there, and that before many hours, too.”
With this dismally prophetic remark the captain gave orders to cast off
the lines, and the steamer was soon on its way down the bay.
The three brothers, George, Arthur, and Joe Warren, and Henry Burns left
the wharf and were walking in the direction of the hotel, when a remark
from the latter stopped them short.
“Did it occur to any of you,” asked Henry Burns, speaking in a slightly
drawling tone, “that we shall never have a better opportunity to play a
practical joke on your friends than we have to-day—?”
“What friends?” exclaimed George Warren, indignantly.
“I thought you said Tom Harris and Bob White were coming down the river
to-day in a canoe,” said Henry Burns, in the most innocent manner.
“And so they are. And you think we would play a joke on them the first
day they arrive, do you? I believe you would get up in the night, Henry
Burns, to play a joke on your own grandmother. No, sirree, count me out
of that,” said George Warren. “It will be time enough to play jokes on
them after they get here. I don’t believe in treating friends in that
way.”
“Rather a mean thing to do, I think,” said Arthur Warren.
“I’m out of it,” said Joe.
“It doesn’t occur to any of you to ask what the joke is, does it?” asked
Henry Burns, dryly.
“Don’t want to know,” replied George.
“Nor I, either,” said Arthur.
“Keep it to play on Witham,” said Joe.
“Then I’ll enlighten you without your asking,” continued Henry Burns,
nothing abashed. “You did not notice, perhaps, that though your friends,
Tom and Bob, did not come ashore to-day, their baggage did, and it is
back there on the wharf. Now I propose that we get John Briggs to let us
take his wheelbarrow, wheel their traps over to the point, pitch their
tent for them, and have everything ready by the time they get here. It’s
rather a mean thing to do, I know, and not the kind of a trick I’d play
on old Witham; but there’s nothing particular on hand in that line for
to-day.”
Henry Burns paused, with a sly twinkle in his eyes, to note the effect of
his words.
“Capital!” roared George Warren, slapping Henry Burns again on the back,
regardless of the delicate state of that young gentleman’s health. “We
might have known better than to take Henry Burns seriously.”
“Same old Henry Burns,” said Arthur. “Take notice, boys, that he never is
beaten in anything he sets his heart on, and that his delicate health
will never, never be any better;” and he was about to imitate his elder
brother’s example in the matter of a punch at Henry Burns, but the
latter, though of slighter build, grappled with him, and after a moment’s
friendly wrestling laid him on his back on the greensward, thereby
illustrating the force of his remark as to Henry Burns’s invincibility.
The suggestion was at once followed. Within an hour the boys had wheeled
the baggage of the campers to a point of land overlooking the bay.
“It’s all here,” said Henry Burns, finally, as two of the boys deposited
a big canvas bag, containing the tent, upon the grass, “except that one
box on the wharf, which looks as though it contained food.”
“We can let that stay there till we get things shipshape here, or get
Briggs to put it in the storehouse by and by,” suggested young Joe.
But if they could have foreseen then that the leaving of the box there
upon the wharf, seemingly such an inconsequential thing, was to be the
means of creating no end of trouble, it is quite possible that even young
Joe himself, though rather fond of his ease, would have brought it away
on his own shoulders; but it seemed of no consequence whether it should
be removed then or later, and so the box remained where it was.
It required but a brief time to pitch the tent. It was a large,
square-shaped canvas, with high walls on two sides, so that a person of
medium height could stand erect there, and running to a peak at the top
in the usual “A” shape. Putting the frame, of two poles and a
cross-piece, together, and drawing the canvas over it as it lay on the
ground, the two larger boys raised it into position while the others
drove the pegs and stretched the guy-ropes.
“Now, then,” drawled Henry Burns, “if you care to, we can carry the joke
still further by cutting some poles and putting up the bunks.”
This proposition also meeting with approval, Henry Burns and the eldest
of the Warrens started for the woods, about a mile distant, to cut some
spruce poles, leaving the younger brothers to complete the pegging of the
tent, ditching it, and getting things in order.
The spot which had been selected for the camping-ground was one of the
most beautiful on the island. It was a small point of land projecting
into the bay, with a sandy beach on either side. Its outermost extremity,
however, ended in a wall of ledge, which went down abruptly, so that the
water at high tide came up to within a few feet of the greensward, and at
low tide dropped down, rather than receded, leaving no bare rocks
exposed.
A few spruce-trees grew on the point, sufficient to give shade, and in
the midst of a clump of them was a clear spring of water that was cool to
iciness during the hottest days. The point commanded a view of the entire
bay on the eastern side of the island, so that when the breeze came up
from the south, as it did almost daily through the summer, blowing fresh
and steadily, the billows over all its broad surface seemed to be aiming
their blows directly at it, while every breath of wind was laden with a
salt odour that was health-giving and inspiring.
It was a choice bit of land that Bob’s uncle had purchased several years
ago, when a few speculators had thought the island might be “boomed” as a
summer resort. The little fishing village of Southport, which numbered
then some twenty odd houses, had, indeed, been augmented by the “boom” by
about the same number of cottages; and adjoining the old tavern there had
been built a more imposing structure, the new and the old composing the
summer hotel.
But the village had not “boomed.” It remained the same peaceful, quiet,
quaint, and interesting village as of yore. Those cottagers who remained
after the boom died out were rather glad than otherwise that the
picturesque place had not been transformed into a fashionable resort.
They liked it for its tranquillity and quaintness, and soon came into
sympathy and friendliness with the villagers, who had parted with their
lands only with the greatest reluctance, and who viewed the new order of
things with a suspicion born of years of conservativeness.
The gaiety of the place centred about the hotel, where, too, the greater
number of the guests were those who came year after year, and who would
as soon have thought of going to Jericho as to any other place than the
island.
The leading citizen of the village was Squire James Brackett, and its
moving spirit one Captain Curtis, or “Cap’n Sam,” as he was familiarly
known. The former owned the best house in the village, a big, rambling,
two-story farmhouse, perched on the hill overlooking the harbour. He was
a vessel-owner and a man of importance. He was the only man in the town
who had persistently refused to associate with the summer residents,
which some attributed to the fact that he feared lest their coming might
disturb his sway over town affairs.
Captain Sam was a man of altogether different stamp. It is safe to say he
was on good terms with everybody on the island. He was for ever busy; the
first man to arise in the town, and the last to retire at night. In fact,
it is a fair assumption that, had Captain Sam deserted the island at an
early date in its history, the town might have eventually fallen so sound
asleep that it would not have awakened to this day.
Captain Sam united in his activities the duties of storekeeper, coal and
ice merchant, musician, constable, and schoolmaster, the latter vocation
occupying his winter months. The energy of the village was concentrated
in this one man, who seemed tireless. He was on intimate terms with
everybody, and knew everybody’s business. That he was rather good-looking
was the cause of some pangs of jealousy on the part of young Mrs. Curtis,
when business called her husband away among the housewives and maids of
the village. Finally, Captain Sam had a voice which defied walls and
distance. It was even told by some of the village humourists that he had
once stood at the head of the island and hailed a vessel sailing around
the extreme southern end, thirteen miles distant.
Grand Island, lying in the middle of the bay, almost divides the upper
part of it into two big bodies of water, so that there are two great
thoroughfares for vessels, leading out to sea, the western being the more
generally used, for it is a more direct passage. The eastern bay is
filled with islands at the entrance to the sea.
In the course of an hour, the boys who had gone to the woods returned to
the camp, bringing with them four spruce poles. These were quickly
trimmed of their branches, and cut to an even length of about seven feet.
Then, four stakes being driven into the ground on each side of the tent
under the walls, to form the legs of the bunks, the poles were mounted on
these and made fast. Then pieces of board were nailed across from pole to
pole, and on these were placed mattresses stuffed with dry hay from
Captain Sam’s stable.
“There,” said young Joe, throwing himself on one of them, “is a spring
bed that can’t be beaten anywhere. I know some think spruce boughs are
better, but they dry, and the needles fall off, and the bed gets hard.
These will last all summer.”
The pliant spruce poles were as good, indeed, as springs.
In the meantime the younger boys had dug a trench completely around the
tent, extending to the edge of the bank on one side of the point, so that
a heavy rain could not flood the floor. In the rear of the tent they had
set a huge box belonging to the campers, made of a packing-case and
provided with a cover that lifted on leather hinges, and a padlock. It
was, presumably, filled with the camp outfit. In one corner of the tent,
on a box, they placed a large oil-stove and oven. The bedding was taken
inside, and everything made shipshape. The comfort of the prospective
campers seemed assured.
Over the top of the tent they had also stretched a big piece of stout
cloth, made for the purpose, which was fastened to the ground at the ends
with guy-ropes and pegs, and which was to protect the tent against
leaking water in any long rainy period, and also serve as additional
shade in hot weather.
The boys had done a hard afternoon’s work. Pinning back the flaps of the
tent, they sat at the entrance and looked out across the bay. The wind,
which blew from the southeast, had not grown idle during the afternoon,
but had increased steadily, and now came strong and damp from off the
bay, rushing in at the opening of the tent and bulging it out so that it
tugged violently at the ropes.
“It won’t do to leave the tent-door unpinned,” said Henry Burns. “It’s
going to blow great guns to-night.” So, closing the entrance and making
it fast, they went to the edge of the bank and sat there.
“It’s rough out there now,” said George Warren, pointing to the bay,
which was one mass of foaming waves; “but it will be worse from now till
midnight. The wind is going to blow harder and the tide is just beginning
to run out.”
The tide indeed set strongly down the island shore, so that when it met
the wind and waves blown up from oceanward it made a rough and turbulent
chop sea.
All at once as they sat there a sailboat rushed out from behind the
headland across the cove and thrashed its way through the white-capped
waves, heading down the island and throwing the spray at every plunge
into the seas. Those aboard had evidently a reckless disregard for their
own safety, for, although such few coasters as could be seen in the
distance were scudding for harbour, fearful of the approaching storm,
this craft carried not only full mainsail and forestaysail,—sail, too,
that was large for the boat at all times,—but a topsail and a jib. The
boat was hauled well into the wind and heeled over, so that the water
again and again came over the board into the cockpit.
Perched upon the windward rail were three boys. A fourth, a boy evidently
near George Warren’s age, stood at the wheel, seemingly the most
unconcerned of all. He was large of his age and powerfully built, and his
sleeves, rolled above the elbow, showed two brown and brawny arms. A
fifth boy, somewhat younger in appearance, lying in the bottom of the
boat, with feet braced against the side, held the main-sheet.
The boat was a white sloop, about thirty feet in length over all, and
clearly fast and able.
“I’ll say one thing for Jack Harvey and his crew,” exclaimed George
Warren, as the yacht rushed by the point, “although I think they’re a
mean lot. They can handle a boat as well as any skipper on the island.
And as for fear, they don’t know what it means.”
“Look!” he cried. “Do you see what they are doing?” as the yacht was
suddenly brought, quivering, into the wind and headed away from the
island on the other tack. “There’s nothing in the world Jack Harvey’s
doing that for except to frighten the hotel guests. He sees the crowd on
the piazza watching him, and is just making game of their fright. He’ll
sail out there as long as he dares, or until his topmast goes, just to
keep them watching him.”
And so indeed it proved. An anxious crowd of summer guests at the hotel
had no sooner begun to rejoice at the boat’s apparent safety, than they
saw it go about and head out into the bay once more. Then they breathed
easier as it headed about again, and came rushing in. Then as it once
more headed for the bay, they realized that what they were witnessing was
a sheer bit of folly and recklessness. Angry as they were, they could but
stand there and watch the yacht manœuvre, the women crying out whenever a
flaw threw the yacht over so that the mainsail was wet by the waves; the
men angry at the bravado of the youthful yachtsmen, and vowing that the
yacht might sink and the crew go with it before they would lift a hand to
save one of them. All of which they knew they did not mean,—a fact which
only increased their irritation.
“Ah!” said George Warren, as a big drop of rain suddenly splashed on his
cheek. “Perhaps this will drive them in, if the wind won’t.” It had,
indeed, begun to rain hard, and, although the crew of the yacht must have
been drenched through and through with the flying spray, the water from
the sky had, evidently, a more dampening effect on their spirits, for the
yacht was headed inshore, and soon ran into a cove about three-quarters
of a mile down the island, behind a point of land where, through the
trees, the indistinct outlines of a tent could be seen.
And so, as it was now the time when the sun would have set upon the bay,
if it had not been shut out from sight by a heavy mass of clouds, and as
the wind came laden with rain, which dashed in the faces of those who
were out-of-doors to encounter it, the boys turned from the spot where
they had gathered and hurried for shelter, the brothers to their cottage,
and Henry Burns to the hotel.
The tent, swayed by the fierce gusts of wind, tugged at its ropes; the
reckless crew of the white sloop had found shelter, and those vessels
that were out upon the bay eagerly sought the same.
But in that part of the bay which rolled between the northern end of the
island and the mouth of the river, fifteen miles away, a greater piece of
recklessness was being enacted than was ever dared by Harvey and his
careless crew. There was none on shore there to witness it, for the
island at that extreme end was bare of settlement.
A mile from the nearest land, seemingly at the mercy of a wild sea which
threatened every moment to engulf it, a small canoe slowly and stubbornly
fought its way toward the island shore. At a distance one would have
thought it a mere log, tossed about at random by the waves; and yet, one
watching it would have seen it slowly draw ahead, glide from under the
spray that broke constantly over its bow, and still make progress;
sometimes beaten back by billows that tumbled fast one upon another, but
gaining something through it all.
There were two occupants of the craft, and, though but mere youths, none
could have handled the paddles more skilfully. Yet it was a question of
the great sea’s strength against their endurance. What would happen
should they find that there came a time when they made no gain? If they
turned about, even supposing that were possible, the storm might drive
them across the bay once more, but their strength and courage would be
gone, and they could hardly hope to reach the shore. It was either the
island goal or nothing.
One standing on the shore would scarce have seen them now. Darkness began
to hide them. But the island loomed up, dim and shadowy, before them, and
they struggled on against the storm.
CHAPTER II.
TO THE RESCUE
A person leaving the wharf at Southport would ordinarily take one of
three roads: the one directly ahead leading up through the village and
past the hotel; the one to the left passing by, though at some distance
from, the cottages that were scattered irregularly along the south shore
of the bay; the road to the right leading similarly to the cottages on
that shore. The shore there, however, made a deep sweep, bordering on a
cove of some considerable extent.
From the shore in all directions the land sloped back, with a gradual
rise for about a mile. Cottages dotted the slope here and there.
To the right of the wharf and the farthest away from it of any dwelling
was the Warren cottage. Somewhat hidden in a grove of spruce-trees, its
broad piazza commanded a fine view of the bay and the islands in the
distance.
On this particular evening, however, there was little inducement of wind
or weather for one to linger there. The rain, driven by the wind through
fluttering tree-branches, dashed itself against the cottage windows as
though the drops were drawn, like moths, to the light which shone from
within; then fell in pools and was swept away by driving gusts. Nought to
be seen there now but sea and sky in wild commotion; darkness in all the
air, blackness over all the bay.
But, despite the dreariness of the storm outside, there was pleasing
comfort within the cottage. The increasing darkness of the night, the
dashing rain and the noisy wind, like unwelcome guests, came only to the
threshold and gained no admittance. A fire of driftwood blazed in the big
stone fireplace, and the soft rays shed by a lamp suspended from the
ceiling further lighted up the cosy room.
There were four occupants of the room. Mrs. Warren, a sweet-faced, cheery
little woman, and the three brothers, were seated about the fire. They
were conversing earnestly, and, as the talk progressed, it seemed as
though the influence of the storm was getting into the room.
“It’s no use, mother,” said George Warren, who stood in front of the
fireplace, facing the others, “trying to make us think that Tom and Bob
did not start to cross the bay. Ever since the boys were out in the big
storm on Moosehead Lake they’ve been afraid of nothing. Tom Harris
declares his canoe will stand as rough a sea as a dory,—and, what’s more,
the storm hadn’t begun by the time they must have left the mouth of the
river.”
“Yes, but Captain Chase would warn them not to cross.”
“I’ve no doubt he did, mother; and, if he did, that might make it so much
the worse. If the boys had been in a sailboat they probably would have
listened to him; but the captain would sneer at that canoe, and would
like as not tell them it wasn’t fit to cross the bay in at any time, much
less in rough water. And that would be just enough to put them on their
mettle. They’d make the attempt, even if they had to put back.”
“Yes, and Tom said in the note that they would be here to-night,” broke
in young Joe. “And when he gave that to Captain Chase to bring, it showed
he meant to start, anyway.”
“But when the storm increased they would put back,” urged Mrs. Warren.
“No,” answered George, “they must have gotten two-thirds of the way
across the bay before the worst of the storm broke. The storm seemed to
hold up for an hour or two during the latter part of the afternoon, and
then increased all of a sudden with the turn of the tide. The boys would
have gotten so far across that it would be too late to turn back, and
they would have to keep on.”
“And yet you boys want to imitate their recklessness!” cried Mrs. Warren,
impatiently. “Come, Arthur,” and she turned to the boy who had remained
silent thus far during the discussion. “Help me convince your brothers of
their mistake. You don’t agree with them, I am sure.”
The boy thus addressed, though a year younger than his elder brother, was
the one on whose judgment the mother more often relied. He was fully as
active as the other two, but his was a calmer temperament than theirs.
This confidence in him really extended to his brothers, though they joked
him on his moderate, studious ways, and called him the “professor,”
because he was a little near-sighted and sometimes wore glasses. He came
forward now and stood by his mother’s chair.
“I can’t help thinking, mother, that George and Joe are right,” he said,
deliberately, while poor Mrs. Warren gasped with dismay. “You wouldn’t
have us play the parts of cowards while the boys may be in danger, and
when we can perhaps save them. There isn’t half the danger you imagine,
either. The wind is blowing now squarely from the east, and once we have
beaten out of the cove we can sail alongshore without heading out to sea.
“Then, too,” he continued, “the yacht is nearly new, and was fitted with
new rigging this year. We’ll promise to sail only a little past the head
of the island and return, or run into Bryant’s Cove and walk back. It’s
no more than we ought to do for the best friends we’ve got. There’s not
another sailboat in the harbour to-night that is as stiff as ours, except
Jack Harvey’s, and it’s out of the question to ask him. The other boats
went out to the races at Seal Harbour, or we would get Captain Sam to go
in his yacht. We can’t ask Jack Harvey to go—that’s certain.”
“Wouldn’t he laugh at us, though!” said George. “He would offer to tow
our boat along, too, or something of that sort, just to be mean, and then
there’d be a nice row.”
Besieged on all sides, Mrs. Warren could but yield a partial consent.
“You and George can go,” she said, turning to Arthur, “but Joe must stay
with me. I can’t spare you all to take such an awful risk.”
“I won’t stay!” cried young Joe, hotly. “That is to say, I—I don’t want
to,” he hastened to add, as Mrs. Warren looked reproachfully at him.
“They need me to help sail the _Spray_,—don’t you, fellows?”
“There ought to be three to manage the boat in this wind,” said George,
somewhat reluctantly. “I guess you’ll have to let him go, mother—”
But at this moment there was the sound of footsteps upon the piazza. Some
one walked around the house, gave a premonitory knock at the door, and
let himself in.
It was Henry Burns. He was equipped for the storm, in oilskins, rubber
boots, and a tarpaulin hat. The water ran from his clothing in little
streams and made a series of pools on the polished wood floor. Declining
Mrs. Warren’s offer of a seat, on the ground that he was too wet, Henry
Burns stood by the mantel near the fireplace, and, with tarpaulin
removed, still looked the pale and delicate student, despite his rough
garments.
“Ahoy there, shipmates,” he said, with great gravity, waving the
tarpaulin at the group. “You weren’t thinking of cruising for your health
this evening, were you? Because, if you were, my health isn’t as good as
it might be, and I think a little salt air would do it good.”
“Bravo!” cried George Warren. “You might know Henry Burns would be on
hand if there was any excitement going on. Never knew him to fail,—Joe,
you’ll have to stay at home now and keep mother company. We don’t need
more than three. Come, Arthur, hurry! We mustn’t lose a minute longer.”
And while young Joe turned away, almost in tears at the verdict, the
other two boys scrambled about, hastily donning reefers, oilskins, and
heavy boots. Then they were gone with a rush and a bang of the door, and
Mrs. Warren and Joe composed themselves as best they could to await their
return.
And could any of them have imagined then, looking forth through the
darkness and the storm, an overturned canoe pounding helplessly upon the
beach of that island shore, it surely would not have comforted the
watchers nor have given courage to those who went forth to rescue.
Descending the bank to the shore of the cove, the boys quickly launched a
rowboat, the tender to the yacht, and, with Henry Burns seated in the
stern, tiller-ropes in hand, the brothers, about equal in strength,
pulled vigorously across the cove, where the sloop lay at anchor under
the lee of the bluff. It was no easy task to cross the cove in that sea;
and often Henry Burns turned the boat from its course and headed out
toward the entrance, to meet some enormous wave that, had it broken over
the side of the boat, would have filled and swamped it.
The yacht _Spray_, sheltered as it was from the brunt of the storm, was
tossing about uneasily as the boys climbed aboard and made the tender
fast astern. It was a small craft, about twenty-five feet over all, with
the hull painted black. It was trim and was able for its size, but, safe
to say, not a fisherman in the village would have cared to put out in it
this night. Still, the boat had been built on an outer island of the bay
for fishing in heavy weather, and was seaworthy.
There were three sets of reefing-points in the mainsail, and, after some
discussion, it was decided to reef the sail down to its smallest size.
While Henry Burns hoisted the sail slightly, the brothers hastily tied in
the reefs, and the halyards were then drawn taut at throat and peak and
made fast. The tender was tied to the buoy. There was no use trying to
tow it in that sea. Then, with George Warren at the tiller, Arthur and
Henry Burns cast off, and the voyage was begun.
When Mr. Warren purchased the boat for his boys, he had it rigged with
especial care for an emergency. The main-sheet was rigged to run through
a double set of pulleys, so that the mainsail could be hauled with
comparative ease in a heavy gale. The sail he had cut down smaller than
the boat had been carrying, so there was less danger of her capsizing.
That very precaution was, however, to prove a source of trouble on this
particular night.
Arthur Warren and Henry Burns now came aft, the iron centreboard was
dropped, and the yacht was almost instantly under headway, standing out
by the bluff and heading almost directly across the cove. Arthur Warren
held the main-sheet, while Henry Burns seated himself, with feet braced
against the centreboard-box, ready for any emergency.
For a moment they were in comparatively smooth water, and then, as they
emerged from the lee of the headland, it seemed as though they had been
suddenly transported into another sea. The wind that struck them careened
the boat over violently, as they were as yet under but little headway.
Easing the yacht for a moment with the sheet, they righted somewhat, but
the prospect was not pleasing. The _Spray_ did not head into the wind
well, and they soon found they could not make even a straight course
across the harbour, with the slant of wind they had.
“We may make something on the next tack,” said George, “but it doesn’t
look very encouraging.”
“Supposing you see how she comes about before we run in near shore,”
suggested Arthur, after some minutes.
In answer, George put the tiller hard down, after giving the little boat
a good headway. The yacht went sluggishly in stays, hung almost in the
eye of the wind for a moment, and then, failing to make headway against
the heavy seas, fell off once more and would not come about.
“There’s only one thing we can do, boys,” said George. “We must run in
under the shelter of the wharf and shake out that last reef. The sail is
too small to reef down so close. I’m sure she will beat under a double
reef. It’s the only thing left to do.”
It was the work of but a few minutes to carry out this plan. The third
reef was shaken out and the sail hoisted. Once more the yacht emerged
from shelter. The change for the better in its working was at once
apparent. It pointed higher into the wind, though careening over so that
the water came unpleasantly near the top of the high wash-boards. But the
yacht would stand this. The question now to be tested was, would she act
and come about under the still small sail she was carrying against the
force of such a sea.
“Now, then,” said George, as they neared the bluff again, “we will try
her once more. If she fails now we are beaten. We cannot carry more sail.
That’s sure.”
He put the tiller down as he spoke, and the _Spray_, responding bravely,
headed into the seas. They strove angrily to overwhelm the little craft,
and dashed furiously against her bows, while the wind worried the
flapping sails as though it would tear them from boom and mast; but the
_Spray_ held on and came about nobly, and they were away again on the
other tack, standing across the harbour.
It seemed an hour before they had beaten out where they dared to stand
past the bluff and head alongshore. They had left all shelter hopelessly
behind; on one side of them a wilderness of foaming waves rushed upon
them from the darkness; on the other side lay the lee shore, high and
rock-bound for the most part, but now and then broken by small stretches
of beach. Against the former, the seas broke with heavy crashings; upon
the other, with an ominous booming.
But they headed off the wind a trifle, eased the sheet, made by the
point, and stood along the shore as near as they dared to run. It was
well for them that the little yacht was a good sea boat. Again and again,
as some wave, lifting its white crest above the others, threatened to
overwhelm them, the yacht was headed out to sea, and then the wave,
lifting the boat high on its crest and rolling rapidly from beneath it
till half the length of the yacht seemed poised in air, left it to fall
heavily upon the next oncoming wave, or, worse still, to plunge into a
watery gulf, there to be half-buried by the next big sea.
But the yacht lived through it all and kept bravely on its course. Henry
Burns’s arms ached with bailing out the cockpit, where the seas broke in
over the quarter, or came aboard in clouds of spray as they headed into
the wind.
They dared not sail near the shore, and could see it but indistinctly,
save when some larger wave broke upon the beach and carved out a white
line of foam, which vanished as quickly as it appeared. So against the
cliffs that they passed they could see a sudden blur of white as a big
wave hurled itself to destruction. Beyond this all was blear and
indistinct.
They were now within half a mile of the head of the island, and, looking
ahead into the darkness, which, with the rain, had greatly increased
within the last hour, like the beginning of a fog, they realized how
useless was the search they had begun. They could see but the merest
distance in any direction. The storm was steadily increasing, and already
a new condition confronted them. The wind was shifting to the southeast,
from east, so that their return was rendered impossible. It was worse
than folly to think of beating back in such a head sea. The wind on their
quarter was driving them along furiously. It was madness to dream of
keeping on past the head of the island.
“We can’t make Bryant’s Cove any too soon to suit me,” said George. “The
_Spray_ has got more wind now than she knows what to do with.”
The little boat was, indeed, burying her bows under at every plunge, and
trembled in all her timbers at the fearful strain. It was plain that she
had reached the limit of her seaworthiness. Bryant’s Cove was a short
distance around the head of the island. Once there, they would be
sheltered from the storm.
The boys had ceased to speak of a possible rescue of their friends. It
was a question of their own salvation now, and the instinct of
self-preservation asserted itself. Henry Burns peered eagerly ahead, but
looked only for the point of land behind which lay their safety. Suddenly
he turned and uttered a shrill cry of fright, such as no one had ever
heard from him before.
“Luff her, George! Luff quick—quick, for your life!” he cried, and,
springing for the tiller, threw his weight against it ere the startled
helmsman could find strength to act.
The yacht, with sails slatting, came into the wind amid a cloud of spray.
The boom, striking a wave, had nearly snapped in two. But it was not an
instant too soon.
A black object that looked enormous rose suddenly out of the sea in front
of the _Spray_. The next wave lifted it high in the air, and hurled it
down upon them. It was a ship’s yawl-boat, of immense size, fully as
large as the yacht itself. Down the watery declivity it shot, swift and
straight, like some sea-monster in pursuit of its quarry.
But the little yacht had answered her helm well. There was a crash and a
splintering of wood, and the yawl drifted rapidly past and was lost in
the darkness. The yacht _Spray_, her bowsprit and fore-rigging torn away,
once more fell off the wind and was driven on by the storm. It was an
escape so narrow that a moment more and they had been dashed to pieces.
Henry Burns was the first to regain his courage.
“It’s better the bowsprit than the rudder,” he said, coolly. And his
courage gave them strength. A few minutes later they had passed the head
of the island and gained the lee of the land, and in fifteen minutes more
they had cast anchor in Bryant’s Cove.
“I am willing to do whatever you boys think is best,” said George Warren,
as they lowered and furled the sail and made the yacht snug for the
night. “But I think it’s of no use for us to make any search for the boys
along this shore. If they capsized in the bay to-night, neither they nor
their canoe would come ashore here. The canoe would be blown across the
bay; and they— Well, we’re bound to believe that they didn’t start, or,
if they did, that they put back.”
“I don’t see but what we have done all we can to-night,” responded his
brother; “and, as we have got five miles of muddy road to travel, the
sooner we start the better. We could stay in the boat to-night, but we
must get back on mother’s account. Depend upon it, she has worried every
single minute we have been gone, and I don’t blame her, either. Now it’s
all over, I don’t mind saying I think we were fools to come out. But we
meant well, so perhaps the less said the better. We’ll have to leave the
_Spray_ to herself till the storm goes down. Nobody will harm her.”
“I don’t mind staying here to-night and looking after her,” said Henry
Burns. “To be sure, old Witham doesn’t know I have left the hotel, but I
tumbled my bed up before I came away, and he will only think I got up
early in the morning, if he wonders where I am.”
“No, no, old fellow. We won’t let you stay. We won’t hear of it,” said
both brothers. “The sooner we all get home and get dry clothes on, the
better. There’s no need of any of us staying. The _Spray_ won’t sail out
of the cove of herself, and every one on the island knows her.”
So, as they had left the tender behind, they removed their clothing, tied
it into bundles, slung them around their necks, and, slipping overboard,
swam to shore.
“If I ever was more glad to get on land alive than I am at present,” said
Henry Burns, his teeth chattering with the cold, as he hastily scrambled
into his clothes, “I don’t happen to remember it just at this instant. I
wonder if my aunt would send me down here again for my health if she
could see me now.”
There was something so ludicrous in the idea that the boys could not help
bursting into roars of laughter,—though they felt little enough like
merriment.
“The more I think of it,” said Henry Burns, “the more I believe the boys
are snug ashore at Millville, and that they haven’t been within ten miles
of Grand Island to-night.”
“I think you are right, Henry,” responded Arthur.
“It must be so,” said George.
And yet not one of them dared to believe absolutely that what he said was
true.
They started off across lots now, walking as rapidly as their wet and
heavy clothing would allow, to strike the road which led to the harbour.
Coming at length into this road, they had walked but a short distance,
and were at the top of a hill at a turn of the road where it left the
shore, when Henry Burns, pointing down along the shore, said:
“We ought to remember that part of the bay as long as we live, for we
shall never be much nearer to death than we were right there.”
“Sure enough,” responded Arthur, “it was just about off there that the
big yawl smashed our bowsprit off.”
“The yawl must have been driven ashore by this time,” said George. “Wait
a minute and I will take a look.” And he disappeared over the bank and
was lost in the bushes. The two boys seated themselves by the side of the
road to await his return, but started up with a horror in their hearts as
a shrill cry came up to them from the shore. There was that in the cry
that told them that George Warren had found other than the ship’s
long-boat. They scarcely dared to think what. Then they, too, dashed down
the slope to the shore.
When they reached his side, George Warren could scarcely speak from
emotion.
“Look! Look!” he cried, in a trembling, choking voice, and pointed out
upon the beach where the tide had gone down.
There were two strange objects there that the sea had buffeted in its
wild play that night, and then, as though grown tired of them, had cast
upon the shore, among the rocks and seaweed.
One was the long-boat, no longer an object of danger, for the sea had
hurled it against a rock and stove its side in. The other was a canoe.
The sea had overturned it and tossed it upon the shore. Two of its
thwarts were smashed where it had been dropped down and pinioned upon a
rock—and the rock held it fast.
CHAPTER III.
A SURPRISE
With hearts beating quick and hard, they lifted the canoe from the rock,
fearful of what they might find beneath it; but there was nothing there.
Then they searched along the beach in the darkness as best they could,
peering anxiously into clumps of seaweed, and standing now and again
fixed with horror as some dim object, cast up by the sea, assumed in
shadowy outline the semblance of a human form. The shore was heaped here
and there with piles of driftwood and ends of logs that had come down
through countless tides and currents from the lumber-mills miles up the
river, and this stuff had lodged among the ledges and boulders at various
points along the beach. Here and there among these they hunted, groping
amid the seaweed, cold and chill to the touch, and suggesting to their
minds, already alert with dread, the most gruesome of discoveries which
they feared to make.
That the boys had crossed the bay in the frail craft which they had just
found there seemed to be no possible doubt. Furthermore, they were now
led to believe that Tom and Bob, having once reached a point where they
could have found shelter, had chosen to keep on past the head of the
island in an effort to make the harbour of Southport. They must at least,
as the wind had blown, have reached a point opposite where the boys had
found the canoe, and have, perhaps, paddled some distance beyond.
But it was clearly useless to continue the search further in the darkness
and storm. They lifted the canoe and carried it up from the beach, and
hid it in the bushes upon the bank. Then they went slowly back to the
road.
“I tell you what we can do,” said Arthur Warren. “I hate to go back to
the cottage without making one more search. Let’s get a lantern and come
back. We shall not have to go far for one,—and we shall have done all we
can, then, though it is a bad night to see anything.”
The rain was, indeed, pouring in torrents and driving in sheets against
their faces.
“Yes, we must do that much,” said George. “And then—then we can come back
in the morning—” His voice choked, and he could not say more. They went
on down the muddy road in silence.
Shortly below the hill, upon the road, was a big farmhouse, arriving at
which they turned into the yard. The house was in darkness, save one dim
light in a chamber; but they pounded at the door with the heavy brass
knocker till they heard the shuffling of feet in the entry, and a voice
inquired roughly what was wanted. They answered, and the door was opened
cautiously a few inches, where it was held fast by a heavy chain. An old
man’s face peered out at them. The sight of the boys was evidently
reassuring, for, in a moment more, the man threw open the door and
invited them to walk in.
“There be rough sailors come by some nights,” he said, in a manner
apologizing for his suspicion. “I’m here alone, and”—he lowered his voice
to a husky whisper—“they do say that I have a bit of money hid away in
the old house. But it’s a lie. It’s a lie. It’s the sea and the garden I
live on. There’s not a bit of money in the old house. But what brings you
out in such a storm? You haven’t lost your way, have you?”
They told their story, while the old man sat in a chair, shaking his head
dubiously. When they told him of the finding of the canoe, and their
certainty that the boys had crossed in it, he declared that it could
never have lived to get to the island.
“It must have come from down below,” he said. “It could never have been
paddled across the bay against this sea. Two boys, d’ye say, paddled it?
No. No, my lads, never—upon my life, never. Two stout men in a dory, and
used to these waters, might have done it; but two lads in a cockle-shell
like that would never have reached the Head, let alone getting beyond
it.”
He seemed to regard them almost with suspicion, when they told him of how
they had sailed up along shore in search of their comrades, and was
perhaps inclined to believe their whole story as some kind of a hoax.
Certain it was he gave them little comfort, except to say he would look
alongshore in the morning. If any one had drowned offshore in the
evening, they might not come ashore till the next day, he said.
But he got a battered lantern for them and handed it over with a
trembling hand, cautioning them to be careful of it, and to leave it by
the door on their way back. They heard him bolt the heavy door behind
them as they turned out of the yard into the road. A clock in the kitchen
had struck the hour of ten as they left the house.
“Isn’t it very probable, after all,” said George, as they walked along,
“that the man may be right, and that this canoe we have found is one that
has been lost off some steamer?”
“It seems to me perhaps as probable,” answered Henry Burns, “as that the
boys should have attempted to keep on in the storm, having once reached a
place of safety.”
“I wish I could think so,” said Arthur. “But I can’t help fearing the
worst,—and if the boys are lost,” he exclaimed bitterly, “I’ve seen all I
want to of this island for one summer. I’d never enjoy another day here.”
“I won’t believe it’s their canoe until I have to,” said George. “They
are not such reckless chaps as we have been making them out.”
And he tried to say this bravely, as though he really meant it.
They tramped along the rest of the way to the shore in silence, for none
of them dared to admit to another that which he could not but believe.
By the lantern’s dim and flickering light they searched the beach again
for a half-mile along in the vicinity of where the canoe had come ashore.
But nothing rewarded their hunt.
“The old man must be right,” said George Warren. “The canoe must have
come ashore from some steamer. Let’s go home, anyway. We’ve done all we
can.”
Heart-sick and weary, they began the tramp back to the cottage. At about
a mile from the old farmhouse, where they left the lantern, they turned
off from the road and made a cut across fields, till they came at length
to the shore of the cove opposite the Warren cottage. They could see
across the water the gleam of a large lantern which young Joe had hung on
the piazza for them; but the boat they had expected to find drawn up on
shore was gone.
“Old Slade must be over in town,” said Henry Burns; “and he won’t be back
to-night, probably. So it’s either walk two miles more around the cove or
swim out to the tender. We’re all of us tired out. Shall we draw lots to
see who swims?”
“I’ll go, myself,” volunteered George. “I’d rather swim that short
distance than do any more walking. I’m about done up, but I am good for
that much.” And he threw off his clothing once more, and swam pluckily
out to the tender and brought it ashore. They pulled across the cove to
the shore back of the cottage, and, springing out, carried the boat high
up on land.
They were at the cottage then in a twinkling; but, even before they had
reached the door, dear Mrs. Warren, who had heard their steps upon the
walk, was outside in the rain, hugging her boys who had braved the storm
and who had come back safe. She was altogether too much overcome at the
sight of them, it seemed, to inquire if they had found those in search of
whom they had set out.
And then the dear little woman, having embraced and kissed them as though
they had been shipwrecked mariners, long given up for lost,—not
forgetting Henry Burns, who wasn’t used to it, but who took it calmly all
the same, as he did everything else,—hurried them into the kitchen, where
young Joe had the big cook-stove all of a red heat, and where dry
clothing for the three from the extensive Warren wardrobe was warming by
the fire.
A comical welcome they got from young Joe, who had been just as much
worried as Mrs. Warren, but who hadn’t admitted it to his mother for a
moment, and had scornfully denied the existence of danger, and yet who
was every bit as relieved as she to see the boys safe. He tried not to
appear as though a great weight had been removed from his mind by their
return, but made altogether a most commendable failure.
The big, roomy, old-fashioned kitchen—for the Warren cottage had
originally been a rambling old farmhouse, which they had remodelled and
modernized—had never seemed so cosy before. And the fire had never seemed
more cheery than it did now. And when they had scrambled into dry, warm
clothing, and Mrs. Warren had taken the teakettle from the hob, and
poured them each a steaming cup of tea, to “draw out the chill,” they
forgot for the moment what they had been through and their sad discovery.
In fact, it seemed as though Mrs. Warren and young Joe were strangely
indifferent to what had sent them forth, and were easily satisfied with
the opinions expressed by the boys, who had agreed not to mention the
finding of the canoe until something more definite was learned, that Tom
and Bob had in all probability not left the river.
So easily satisfied, indeed, and so little affected by the fruitless
errand they had been on, that all at once Henry Burns, who had been eying
Mrs. Warren sharply for some moments, suddenly rose up from where he was
sitting, and rushed out of the kitchen, through the dining-room, into the
front part of the house. Wondering what had come over him, the others
followed.
What they saw was a tableau, with Henry Burns as exhibitor. He had drawn
aside the heavy portière with one hand, and stood pointing into the room
with the other.
There, seated before the fireplace, were two boys so much like Tom and
Bob, whom they had given up for lost, that their own mothers, had they
been there, would have wept for joy at the sight of them. And then, what
with the Warren boys pounding them and hugging them, like young bears, to
make sure they were flesh and blood, and not the ghosts of Tom and Bob,
and with the cheers that fairly made the old rafters ring, and the
happiness of Mrs. Warren, who was always willing to adopt every boy from
far and near who was a friend of one of her boys,—what with all this,
there was altogether a scene that would have done any one’s heart good,
and might have shamed the storm outside, if it had been any other kind of
a storm than a pitiless southeaster.
Then, though the hour was getting late, they all sat about the big
fireplace, and Tom narrated the story of the shipwreck.
But, just as he began, young Joe said, with mock gravity:
“We haven’t introduced Henry Burns to the boys yet. Henry, this is Tom
Harris, and this is Bob White.”
“I don’t think we need an introduction to one who has risked his life for
us,” said Tom Harris, heartily, as he and Bob sprang up to shake hands
with Henry Burns. But Henry Burns, carrying out the joke, bowed very
formally, and politely said he was extremely happy to make their
acquaintance. At which Tom and Bob, unfamiliar with the ways of Henry
Burns, stared in astonishment, which sent the Warren boys into roars of
laughter.
The boys thus introduced to Henry Burns were handsome young fellows,
evidently about the same age,—in fact, each lacked but a few months of
fifteen,—thick-set and strongly built. The sons of well-to-do parents,
and neighbours, they had been inseparable companions ever since they
could remember. Tom Harris’s father was the owner of extensive tracts in
the Maine woods, from which lumber was cut yearly and rafted down the
streams to his lumber-mills. In company with him on several surveying and
exploring expeditions, the boys had hunted and fished together, and had
paddled for weeks along the streams and on the lakes of the great Maine
wilderness.
They had hunted and fished in the Parmachenee and the Rangeley Lake
region, and knew a great deal more of real camp life than most boys of
double their age. Further than this, they were schoolmates, and were so
equally matched in athletic sports, in which they both excelled, that
neither had ever been able to gain a decided victory over the other. Tom
was of rather light complexion, while Bob was dark, with curly, black
hair.
It was through their friendship with the Warren boys, who lived not far
from them, in the same town, that they had decided to spend the summer
camping on Grand Island.
As they all gathered around the cheerful blaze of the fire, Tom told the
story of the day’s adventures.
With so much of their camp kit as they needed for cooking along the
river, they had started from the town of Benton at about four o’clock
that morning, just as the tide began to ebb. Hardened as they were to the
use of the paddle, by the time the tide had ceased to ebb and slack water
ensued, they had left the city miles behind and were well down the river.
Then the flood tide began to set strong against them, and a wind arose
that furrowed the river with waves that were not big enough to be
noticeable to larger craft, but which seriously impeded the progress of
the frail canoe. They kept steadily on, but made slow headway.
At Millville, a few miles above the mouth of the river, where it
broadened out into the bay, they had met the steamer, and had hastily
scrawled the note which Captain Chase had brought to the Warren boys.
Sure enough, Captain Chase had warned them of the impending storm, and,
furthermore, had offered to transport them and their canoe across the
bay; but they had declined his offer, wishing to paddle the entire
distance to the island. They had set their hearts on making the trip of
forty miles in one day; and partly for this reason, and partly because
Captain Chase had looked askance at their canoe, and had assured them
that it was not a fit craft for bay work in any weather, let alone in a
heavy sea, they had set out, toward the latter part of the afternoon, to
cross the fifteen miles of bay which lay between them and Grand Island.
The storm which had threatened gradually closed in around them, but they
held on stubbornly, until, when too far across the bay to put back, it
rapidly gathered strength, and soon turned what had been a comparatively
safe pathway across the sea into a wilderness of waves, that at one
moment rose high above the bow of the canoe, dashing them with spray as
the sharp canoe cleaved them, and the next dropped down beneath them,
opening a watery trench, into which they plunged.
They had seen storms like this, that came quick and sharp upon the lakes,
heaving up a sea almost in a moment, with squalls that swept down from
the hills. They had been safely through them before; but at those times
it had been a short, sharp battle for a half-hour at most, before they
could reach a friendly shore. But here it was different. Here were miles
of intervening water between them and the nearest land. This was no lake,
to be quickly within the shelter of some protecting point of land.
But they had never for a moment lost courage nor despaired of coming
through all right. They struggled pluckily on, and might have gotten
safely to land without mishap, if they had been familiar with the shore
of the island. To a stranger, the shore about the head of the island
presented a sheer front of forbidding cliffs, rising abruptly from the
water, and against which, in a storm, the sea dashed furiously.
There was apparently no place at which a boat could be landed; and yet,
hidden behind the very barrier of ledge that sheltered it, lay Bryant’s
Cove, as quiet and sequestered a pool as any fugitive craft could wish to
find. Had the boys known of its existence, they would have landed there,
and have been at the Warren cottage before the _Spray_ had left the
harbour.
As it was, there seemed to them to be no alternative but to keep on to a
point about half a mile farther along the shore, where they hoped to be
able to make a landing upon the beach.
They had accomplished the distance, and were fast nearing a place where
they could land in safety, when a most unexpected and disastrous accident
happened. Suddenly, and without the slightest warning of its weakness,
the paddle which Bob was using snapped in two in his hands. At the same
moment a wave hit the canoe, and, with nothing with which to keep his
balance, Bob was thrown bodily from the canoe into the sea, upsetting the
canoe and spilling Tom out at the same time.
The boys were able to grasp the canoe and cling on for a few minutes.
They were both good swimmers, and often, in smooth water, had practised
swimming, with the canoe upset, and were able to accomplish the feat of
righting it, bailing it with a dipper, which they always carried attached
to one of the thwarts by a cord, and then climbing aboard over the ends.
But it was useless to attempt such a thing in this boisterous sea.
Indeed, it was more than they could do, even, to cling to the overturned
craft, for soon an enormous wave struck it a blow broadside and tore it
from their grasp. Then ensued a fight for life that seemed almost
hopeless. They were near to shore, but the sea seemed to delight in
mocking them; tossing them in at one moment, so that they could grasp at
seaweed that lay above the ledges, and then clutching at them and drawing
them relentlessly back.
It was then that their athletic training stood them in good stead. Less
hardy constitutions and weaker muscles than theirs would have quickly
tired under the strain. Refraining from useless struggles to gain the
shore, they waited their opportunity, and strove merely for the moment to
keep themselves afloat. In this manner they were, several times, almost
cast up on shore.
All at once Tom Harris felt a sharp pain in his right hand. Then he
realized, with a thrill of hope, that he had struck it upon a rock. It
was, indeed, a narrow reef that made out some distance from shore. They
had narrowly escaped being dashed upon it head-foremost. Tom waited and
gathered his strength as the next wave hurled him on its crest in the
direction of the ledge. Then, as the wave bore him with great force
against it, he broke the force of the shock with his hands, was thrown
roughly up against it, and managed to cling fast, with his fingers in a
niche of the rock, as the wave, receding, strove to drag him back again.
Then, holding on with one hand, he managed somehow to grasp at Bob as he
was drifting by, and hold him fast and draw him in. Clinging to the ledge
as each succeeding wave broke over them, they waited till they had
regained their strength and recovered their wind, and then slowly worked
their way along the ledge to shore, and at length were safe, out of the
sea’s fury.
Then they had rested awhile, before setting out on foot. Their canoe they
could see at some distance out from shore, tossing about at the mercy of
the waves. It must of necessity come ashore in due time, but it might not
be for an hour, and they resolved not to wait for it, but to push on to
their destination, returning on the morrow to look for it. They followed
the shore for about a mile down the island, till they met a fisherman,
who told them how to get to the Warren cottage by the same route the
Warren boys and Henry Burns had taken a few hours later.
They had crossed the cove in old Slade’s boat, and, expecting to astonish
the Warren boys by their appearance, in the midst of the storm, had
found, to their dismay, that those whom they had expected to find safe at
home were imperilling their lives for them out in the bay.
“Well, I must be up and moving,” said Henry Burns, when Tom had concluded
his narrative. “I don’t mind saying I’m a bit tired with this night’s
work—and I guess you are, by the looks. I can sleep, too, now that I know
that you are not down among the mermaids at the bottom of Samoset Bay.”
“Why don’t you stay here with the boys to-night, Henry?” said Mrs.
Warren. “You cannot get into the hotel at this hour of the night, without
waking everybody up. Colonel Witham closes up early, you know.”
“No one but Henry Burns can, mother,” said Joe Warren. “Henry has a
private staircase of his own.”
“It’s a lightning-rod staircase, Mrs. Warren,” explained Henry Burns. “I
use it sometimes after ten o’clock, for that is my bedtime, you know.
Mrs. Carlin—good soul—sends me off to bed regularly at that hour, no
matter what is going on; and so I have to make use of it occasionally.”
Mrs. Warren shook her head doubtfully.
“You shouldn’t do it, Henry,” she said. “Although I know it is hard for a
strong, healthy boy to go off to bed every night at ten o’clock. Well,
that comes of being too strict, I suppose,—but do look out and don’t
break your neck. It’s a bad night to be climbing around.”
“Don’t worry about Henry Burns, mother,” said Arthur. “He wouldn’t do it,
if he wasn’t forced to it,—and he knows how to take care of himself, if
anybody does.”
“Well, good night,” said Henry Burns. “And don’t forget, I hold my
reception to-morrow night; and I extend to Tom and Bob a special
invitation to be present.” And, with a knowing glance at George Warren,
Henry Burns took his departure.
As the boys went off to bed that night, George Warren explained to them
that on the next night, the occasion being an entertainment in place of
the regular Wednesday night hop at the hotel, he and Henry Burns had
planned a joke on Colonel Witham, in which they were all to take part,
and, with this prospect in view, they dropped asleep.
In the meantime Henry Burns, arriving at the hotel, and having learned by
previous experience that a lock on a rear door of the old part of the
hotel, which was not connected with the new by any door, could be
manipulated with the aid of a thin blade of a jack-knife, crept up to the
garret by way of a rickety pair of back stairs, and from thence emerged
upon the roof through a scuttle. Then, carefully making his way along the
ridge-pole to where the new part joined the old, he climbed a short
distance up a lightning-rod, to the roof of the new part.
This was a large roof, nearly flat. He walked across, about midway of the
building, to where another rod, fastened at the top to a chimney, came
up. Clinging to this, Henry Burns disappeared over the edge of the roof,
found a resting-place for his foot on a projection which was directly
over his own window, and then lowered himself, like an acrobat, down the
rod to a veranda. Raising the window directly beside the rod, he slipped
inside, closed it softly, and in a few minutes more was abed and sound
asleep.
While all Southport slept, the storm spent its force, and toward morning
gradually subsided. In the place of the beating rain there stole up
through the islands, in the early morning hours, great detached banks of
fog,—themselves like strange, white islands,—which shut out the bay from
the shore. They lay heavy over the water, and, as the boisterous seas
gradually gave way to the long, smooth waves that rolled in without
breaking, one might have fancied that the fog, itself, had a depressing
and tranquillizing influence upon the sea.
Yet old fishermen would have ventured out then, without fear, for there
were signs, that might be read by the weather-wise, that a light west
wind was soon to be stirring that would scatter the fog at its first
advance, and sweep it back out to sea.
But, brief as was the visitation of the fog, it sufficed to hide all
things from sight. And if a boat, in which one boy rowed vigorously, had
put forth from the camp of Jack Harvey, down in the woods, and had come
up along the shore to the wharf, and the box, which was a part of the
belongings of Tom Harris and Bob White, had been lowered from the wharf
into the boat and conveyed back to the camp and hidden away there,—if all
this had happened, it is safe to say that no one would have seen what was
done, nor would any one have been the wiser.
Perhaps some such a thing might, indeed, have occurred, for when Tom and
Bob, Henry Burns, and the Warren boys met at the wharf the next
fore-noon, they found the box gone. They hunted everywhere, ransacked the
storehouse from one end to the other, but it was nowhere to be found.
“And to think that it’s all my fault,” groaned young Joe, as they stood
at the edge of the wharf, after the unsuccessful search. “I might have
known John Briggs would forget to lock it up! It was left in the open
shed there, boys, protected from the rain, and he promised to look out
for it; but he must have forgotten. I spoke to him about it the last
thing last night, on our way home to the cottage.”
“Was it very valuable?” asked Henry Burns.
“Ask Tom what he thinks,” laughed Bob, while Tom tried to look
unconscious, but blushed furiously.
“There’s a pretty sister of mine,” continued Bob, “that thinks so much of
us that she spent a week cooking up a lot of things for us to start our
camping with. There’s a box full of the best stuff to eat you ever
tasted, that somebody will gobble up, I suppose, without once thinking or
caring about the one that made them. Pretty tough, isn’t it, Tom?”
Tom turned redder still, and felt of his biceps, as though he was
speculating what he would do to a certain person, if that person could
only be discovered and come up with.
“I tell you what it is, boys,” said George Warren; “things have had a
strange way of disappearing here this summer, as they never did before;
and, what’s more, if Jack Harvey and his crew haven’t stolen them, they
have at least got the credit for taking the most of it,—and you may
depend upon it, that box is down there in the woods, somewhere about that
camp.”
“Then what’s to hinder our raiding the camp and getting it?” Tom broke
in, angrily. “Bob and I, with two of you, could make a good fight against
all of them.”
“No doubt of that, Tom,” answered George Warren; “but there are two
things to be considered. First, we want to get the box back; and, second,
we are not absolutely certain that they have it. If they have it, you may
be certain that it is carefully hidden away, and we shouldn’t recover it
by making an attack on them. We must find out where it is hidden first,
and then, if we cannot get it away otherwise, we will fight for it.”
“So it seems that we have two scores to settle now,” said Henry Burns,
dryly. “We owe a debt now to Jack Harvey and his crew, and there’s a
long-standing account with Colonel Witham, part of which we must pay
to-night. Be on hand early. The latch-string will be out at number
twenty-one.” So saying, Henry Burns left them.
Late that afternoon Tom and Bob, looking from the door of their tent
across the cove, saw a sight that was at once familiar and strange. It
was a canoe, in which were two occupants, and it was being paddled toward
their camp. The long seas, smooth though they were, still rolled in
heavily, and the light canoe tossed about on their crests like a mere
toy. Still, it did not take long for them to discover that the canoe was
their own. They had supposed it lost, though they had intended to set out
in search of it on the following morning.
In the bow and stern, propelling the craft with paddles roughly
improvised from broken oars, were George and Arthur Warren.
“Tom, old fellow,” said Bob, as the canoe came dancing toward them,
“we’ve lost the box, but we’ve got the luck with us, after all. Not only
are we proof against drowning, but we own a canoe that refuses to be
wrecked.”
And then the bow of the canoe grated on the sandy shore.
CHAPTER IV.
A NIGHT WITH HENRY BURNS
Henry Burns, having neither father nor mother living, had been taken in
charge several years before this by an elderly maiden aunt, whose home
was in the city of Medford, Massachusetts. She was fairly well-to-do,
and, as there had been a moderate inheritance left in trust for the boy
by his parents, they were in comfortable circumstances.
But Henry Burns was made, unfortunately, to realize that this does not
necessarily mean a home, with the happiness that the word implies. Good
Miss Matilda Burns, a sister of Henry’s late father, never having known
the care of a family of her own, had devoted her life to the interests of
a half a score of missions and ladies’ societies of different kinds,
until at length she had become so wrapped up in these that there was
really no room in her life left for the personality of a boy to enter.
Henry Burns was a problem which she failed utterly to solve. Perhaps she
might have succeeded, if she had seen fit to devote less of her time to
her various societies, and more to the boy. But she deemed the former of
far more importance, and felt her duty for the day well performed, in the
matter of his upbringing, if she kept him out of mischief, saw that he
went off to school at the proper hour, and that he did not fall ill.
To achieve two of these ends the most conveniently to her, Miss Matilda
exercised a restraint over Henry Burns which was entirely unnecessary and
altogether too severe. Henry Burns was naturally of a studious turn of
mind, and cared more for a quiet evening with a book than he did for
playing pranks about the neighbourhood at night. At the same time, he had
a healthy fondness for sports, and excelled in them.
He was captain of his ball team, until Miss Matilda found it out and
ordered him to stop playing the game. She considered it too rough for
boys, having had no experience with boys of her own. And so on, with
swimming and several other of his healthful sports. They were altogether
too risky for Miss Matilda’s piece of mind. It came about that Henry
Burns, in order to take part with his companions in their out-of-door
sports, found it necessary to play “hookey” and indulge in them without
her knowing it. He won a medal in a swimming-match, but never dared to
show it to Miss Matilda.
Withal a healthy and athletic youth, he had a pale complexion, which
deceived Miss Matilda into the impression that he was sickly. He was
slight of build, too, which confirmed in her that impression. When once
her mind was made up, there was no convincing Miss Matilda. The family
doctor, called in by her for an examination, found nothing the matter
with him; but that did not avail to alter her opinion. The boy was
delicate, she said, and must not be allowed to overdo.
Accordingly, she made life miserable for Henry Burns. She kept a watchful
eye over him, so far as her other duties would admit of, sent him off to
bed at nine o’clock, tried to dose him with home remedies, which Henry
Burns found it availed him best to carry submissively to his room and
then pitch out of the window, and, in short, so worried over, meddled
with, and nagged at Henry Burns, that, if he had been other than exactly
what he was, she would have succeeded in utterly spoiling him, or have
made him run away in sheer despair.
Henry Burns never got excited about things. He had a coolness that defied
annoyances and disappointments, and a calm persistence that set him to
studying the best way out of a difficulty, instead of flying into a
passion over it. He had, in fact, without fully appreciating it, the
qualities of success.
If, as was true, he was a problem to Miss Matilda, which she did not
succeed in solving, it was not so in the case of his dealings with her.
He made a study of her and of the situation in which he found himself,
and proceeded deliberately to take advantage of what he discovered. He
knew all her weaknesses and little vanities to a degree that would have
amazed her, and cleverly used them to his advantage, in whatever he
wanted to do. Fortunately for her, he had no inclination to bad habits,
and, if he succeeded in outwitting her, the worst use he made of it was
to indulge in some harmless joke, for he had, underlying his quiet
demeanour, an unusual fondness for mischief.
What to do with Henry Burns summers had been a puzzle for some time to
Miss Matilda. She was accustomed, through these months, to visit an
encampment, or summer home, composed of several ladies’ societies, and
the presence of a boy was a decided inconvenience. When, one day, she
learned that an old friend, one Mrs. Carlin, a fussy old soul after her
own heart, was engaged as housekeeper at the Hotel Bayview, at Southport,
on Grand Island, in Samoset Bay, she conceived the idea of sending Henry
Burns there in charge of Mrs. Carlin.
So it came about that Henry Burns was duly despatched to Maine for the
summer, as a guest of Colonel Witham. He had a room on the second floor,
next to that occupied by the colonel, who was supposed also to exercise a
guardianship over him. As Colonel Witham’s disposition was such that he
disliked nearly everybody, with the exception of Squire Brackett, and as
he had a particular aversion to boys of all ages and sizes, he did not
take pains to make life agreeable to Henry Burns. He was suspicious of
him, as he was of all boys.
Boys, according to Colonel Witham’s view of life, were born for the
purpose, or, at least, with the sole mission in life, of annoying older
people. Accordingly, the worthy colonel lost no opportunity of thwarting
them and opposing them,—“showing them where they belonged,” he called it.
But this disagreeable ambition on the part of the colonel was not,
unfortunately, confined to his attitude toward boys. He exercised it
toward every one with whom he came in contact. Despite the fact that he
had a three years’ lease of the hotel, he took absolutely no pains to
make himself agreeable to any of his guests. He looked upon them secretly
as his natural enemies, men and women and children whom he hoped to get
as much out of as was possible, and to give as little as he could in
return.
He was noted for his meanness and for his surly disposition toward all.
Then why did he come there to keep a hotel? Because he had discovered
that guests would come, whether they were treated well or not. The place
had too many attractions of boating, swimming, sailing, and excellent
fishing, winding wood-roads, and a thousand and one natural beauties, to
be denied. Guests left in the fall, vowing they would not put up with the
colonel’s niggardliness and petty impositions another year; but the
following season found them registered there again, with the same cordial
antipathy existing as before between them and their landlord.
In person, Colonel Witham was decidedly corpulent, with a fiery red face,
which turned purple when he became angry—which was upon the slightest
occasion.
“Here’s another boy come to annoy me with his noise and tomfoolery,” was
the colonel’s inward comment, when Mrs. Carlin, the housekeeper, informed
him that Henry Burns was coming, and was to be under her charge.
So the colonel gave him the room next to his, where he could keep an eye
on him, and see that he was in his room every night not later than ten
o’clock, for that was the hour Mrs. Carlin had set for that young
gentleman’s bedtime.
Henry Burns, having in due time made the acquaintance of the Warren boys,
as well as a few other youths of his age, had no idea of ending up his
evenings’ entertainments at ten o’clock each and every night; so he set
about to discover some means of evading the espionage of the colonel and
Mrs. Carlin. It did not take him more than one evening of experimenting
to find that, by stepping out on to the veranda that ran past his own and
Colonel Witham’s windows, he could gain the ascent to the roof by a
clever bit of acrobatics up a lightning-rod. Once there, he found he
could reach the ground by way of the old part of the hotel, in the manner
before described. It is only fair to Henry Burns to state that he did not
take undue advantage of this discovery, but kept on the whole as good
hours as most boys of his age. Still, if there was a clambake, or some
other moonlight jollification, at the extreme end of the island, where
Henry Burns had made friends among a little fishing community, he was now
and then to be seen, sometimes as the village clock was proclaiming a
much later hour than that prescribed by Mrs. Carlin, spinning along on
his bicycle like a ghost awheel. He was generally known and well liked
throughout the entire island.
On the night following the arrival of Tom and Bob, the sounds of a
violin, a clarionet, and a piano, coming from the big parlour of the
Hotel Bayview, told that a dance was in progress. These dances, withal
the music was provided by the guests themselves, were extremely
irritating to Colonel Witham. They meant late hours for everybody, more
lights to be furnished, more guests late to breakfast on the following
morning, and, on the whole, an evening of noise and excitement, which
interfered more or less with his invariable habit of going to bed at a
quarter after ten o’clock every night of his life.
They brought, moreover, a crowd of cottagers to the hotel, who were given
anything but a cordial welcome by Colonel Witham. He argued that they
spent no money at his hotel, and were, therefore, only in the way,
besides adding to the noise.
The guests at the Bayview were, on the whole, accustomed to the ways of
Colonel Witham by experience, and really paid but little attention to
him. They went ahead, planned their own dances and card-parties, and left
him to make the best of it.
This particular evening’s entertainment was rather out of the ordinary,
inasmuch as it was given by a Mr. and Mrs. Wellington, of New York, in
honour of their daughter’s birthday, and, on her account, invitations to
the spread, which was to be served after the dancing, were extended to
the young people of the hotel. In these invitations Henry Burns had, of
course, been included; but Mrs. Carlin and Colonel Witham were obdurate.
It was too late an hour for him; his eating of rich salads and ices was
not to be thought of; in short, he must decline, or they must decline for
him, and that was the end of it.
“Never you mind, Henry,” said good-hearted Bridget Carrington, who was
Mrs. Carlin’s assistant, and with whom Henry Burns had made friendship.
“It’s not you that’ll be going without some of the salad and the
ice-cream, not if I know it. Sure, and Mrs. Wellington says you’re to
have some, too. So just breathe easy, and there’ll be a bit for you and a
little more, too, a-waitin’ just outside the kitchen window about nine
o’clock. So go on now and say never a word.”
So Henry Burns, with the connivance of Bridget, and by the judicious
outlay of a part of his own pocket-money, in the matter of sweet things
and other delicacies dear to youthful appetites, had prepared and planned
for a small banquet of his own in his room, next to that of Colonel
Witham.
“But how will you manage so that Colonel Witham won’t hear us, as he will
be right alongside of us?” George Warren, who was a partner in Henry
Burns’s enterprise, had asked.
“Leave that to me,” said Henry Burns.
The evening wore on; the strains of the music sounded merrily along the
halls; dancing was in full swing,—everybody seemed to be enjoying the
occasion, save Colonel Witham. He had at least conceded to the occasion
the courtesy of a black frock coat and an immaculate white tie, but he
was plainly ill at ease. He stood in the office, the door of which was
open into the parlour, his hands twisting nervously behind his back,
while he glanced, with no good humour in his expression, now at the blaze
of lights in the parlour, and now at the clock, which, however, even
under his impatient gaze, only ticked along in its most provokingly
methodical fashion.
The outer door opened and in walked young Joe Warren, recognized by
Colonel Witham as one of the plagues of his summer existence.
“Good evening, Colonel Witham,” said young Joe, with studied politeness,
and in a tone that ostensibly anticipated an equally cordial response.
“Good evening!” snapped the colonel.
“Good evening, Colonel Witham,” chimed Arthur Warren, close at his
brother’s heels.
The colonel responded gruffly.
“Good evening, colonel,” came an equally cordial greeting from Tom and
Bob, and from George Warren, smiling at Colonel Witham, as though he had
extended them a hearty invitation to be present.
The colonel snorted impatiently, while the colour in his red face
deepened. He did not respond to their salutations.
The boys seated themselves comfortably in the office chairs, and listened
to the music.
“You needn’t think you’re going to get Henry Burns to go off with you,”
the colonel said, finally. “It’s half-past nine now, and his bedtime is
ten o’clock. I wonder where he is.”
Arthur Warren chuckled quietly to himself. He could have told the colonel
just where Henry Burns was at that moment; that he was busily engaged in
conveying a certain basket of supplies from outside the kitchen window,
up a pair of back stairs, to his room on the second floor above.
“You go and keep an eye on Colonel Witham,” he had said to Arthur Warren,
“and if he starts to look for me, you go to the door and whistle.”
Which accounted for the sudden appearance of all the Warrens and Tom and
Bob in the presence of Colonel Witham.
Fifteen minutes elapsed, and one by one they had all disappeared.
“Good riddance,” was the colonel’s mental ejaculation when he found them
gone.
Great would have been his amazement and indignation could he have but
seen them, a few minutes later, seated comfortably on the bed in Henry
Burns’s room. It was approaching ten o’clock.
“Where’s Bob?” asked Henry Burns, as the boys quietly entered, and he
made the door fast behind them.
“Hm!” said Tom, shaking his head regretfully. “It’s a sad thing about
Bob. It’s too bad, but I don’t think he will be here, after all.”
“Why, what’s the matter?” exclaimed Henry Burns, with surprise. “He isn’t
hurt, is he? I saw him a few hours ago, and he seemed all right.”
“No, he isn’t hurt,—at least, not the way you mean, Henry. The fact is,
he was dancing out on the piazza about half an hour ago with pretty
little Miss Wilson,—you know, the one in the cottage down on the
shore,—and the last I saw of Bob he was escorting her home. I’m afraid we
shall have to give him up for to-night.”
“That’s too bad,” said Henry Burns, solemnly, as though some grievous
misfortune had come upon Tom’s chum. “And the worst of it is, it may last
all summer. Well, Bob will miss a very pleasant surprise-party to Colonel
Witham, to say nothing of the spread. That, by the way, is stowed away in
those baskets over behind the bed and the wash-stand,—but, first, we’ve
got to clear the coast of Colonel Witham.”
“We’re yours to command, Henry,” replied George Warren. “Tell us what to
do.”
“Well, in the first place,” said Henry Burns, opening one of his windows
that led out on to the veranda, as he spoke, “the rest of you just listen
as hard as ever you can at my door, while George and I make a brief visit
to the colonel’s room. If you hear footsteps, just pound on the wall, so
we can get back in time. It’s pretty certain he won’t be here, though,
until we are ready for him. He hasn’t missed a night in weeks in getting
to bed exactly at a quarter past ten o’clock. He’s as regular as a
steamboat; always on time. And he’s a good deal like a steamboat, too,
for he snores like a fog-horn all night long.”
Henry Burns and George Warren disappeared through the window and were
gone but a moment, when they reappeared, each bearing in one hand a lamp
from the colonel’s room.
“The colonel is always talking about economy,” explained Henry Burns, “so
I am not going to let him burn any oil to-night, if I can help it. My
lamps happen to need filling,—I’ve borrowed an extra one for this
occasion, and so, you see, I don’t intend to waste any of the colonel’s
oil by throwing it away. I’ll see that not a drop of the colonel’s oil is
wasted.”
Henry Burns carefully proceeded to pour the oil from each lamp which he
and George Warren had brought from the colonel’s room into those in his
own room.
“There,” he said, “there’s enough oil in each of those wicks to burn for
several minutes, so the colonel will have a little light to start in on.
But we don’t want to return his lamps empty, and so I’ll just fill them
up again. I’m sure the colonel would approve of this economy.”
And Henry Burns carefully refilled the colonel’s lamps from his
water-pitcher.
“It won’t burn very well,” he said. “But I’m sure it looks better.”
“Now, we’ll just take these back again,” he continued, addressing George
Warren. “And there’s another little matter we want to arrange while we
are in there. The colonel is always finding fault with the housemaids.
Now we’ll see if we can’t improve on their work.”
Again the two boys disappeared, while the remaining three stood watch
against the colonel’s sudden appearance.
Once in the colonel’s room, Henry Burns seized hold of the bedclothes and
threw them over the foot-board. Then he snatched out three of the slats
from the middle of the bed, replacing them with three slender sticks,
which he had brought from his own room.
“Those will do to support the bedclothes and the mattress,” he explained,
“though I’m really afraid they would break if any one who was kind of
heavy should put his weight on them.” Then he carefully replaced the
mattress and the bedclothes, making up the colonel’s bed again in the
most approved style, with his friend’s assistance.
“You take notice,” he said to George Warren, as he opened a closet door
in the colonel’s room, “that I am careful to destroy nothing of the
colonel’s property. I might have sawed these slats in two, and left them
just hanging so they would support the bedclothes, and would not have
been any more trouble; but, being of a highly conscientious nature, I
carefully put the colonel’s property away, where it can be found later
and restored.”
“I’m afraid the colonel wouldn’t appreciate your thoughtfulness,” said
George Warren.
“Alas, I’m afraid not,” said Henry Burns. “But that’s often the reward of
those who try to look after another’s interests. However, I’ll put these
slats in this closet, shut and lock the door, and put the key here on the
mantelpiece, just behind this picture. It would be just as easy to hide
the key, but I don’t think that would be right, do you?”
“Certainly not,” laughed George Warren.
“There,” said Henry Burns, taking a final survey of everything. “We’ve
done all we can, I’m sure, to provide for the colonel’s comfort. If he
chooses to find fault with it, it will surely be from force of habit.”
They took their departure by way of the colonel’s window, closing it
after them, and quickly rejoined their companions in the next room.
“I deeply regret,” said Henry Burns to his guests, “that this banquet
cannot begin at once. But we should surely be interrupted by the colonel,
and, on the whole, I think it is best to wait until the colonel has taken
his departure for the night from that room,—which I feel sure he will do,
when the situation dawns fully upon him.
“It also pains me,” he added, “to be obliged to invite you all to make
yourselves uncomfortable in that closet for a short time. At least, you
will hear all that is going on in the colonel’s room, for the partition
is thin between that and his room. So you will have to be careful and
make no noise. I feel quite certain that the colonel will make me a
sudden call soon after he retires, if not before, and he really wouldn’t
approve of your being here. He’s likely to have a decidedly unpleasant
way of showing his disapproval, too.”
“I think we can assure our kind and thoughtful host that we fully
appreciate the situation,” said Arthur Warren, gravely, “and will be
pleased to comply with his suggestion to withdraw. Come on, boys, let’s
get in. It’s after ten now, and time is getting short.”
“You take the key with you,” said Henry Burns, “and lock the door on the
inside. It’s just an extra precaution; but I can say I don’t know who has
the key, if anything happens. I won’t know which one of you takes it.”
The four boys stowed themselves away in the stuffy closet, turned the key
in the lock, and waited. Henry Burns quickly divested himself of his
clothing, put a bowl of water beside his bed, placed a clean white
handkerchief near it, set a lamp near by on a chair, turned it down so
that it burned dim, unlocked his door so that it could be opened readily,
and jumped into bed.
He did not have long to wait. Promptly at a quarter past ten o’clock the
heavy, lumbering steps of the corpulent colonel were heard, as he came up
the hallway. The colonel was puffing with the exertion which it always
cost him to climb the stairs, and muttering, as was his custom when
anything displeased him.
“Suppose they’ll bang away on that old piano half the night,” he
exclaimed, as he passed Henry Burns’s door. “And every light burning till
midnight. How do they expect me to make any money, if they go on this
way?”
He opened the door to his room and went inside, locking it after him.
Henry Burns pressed his ear close to the wall and listened.
The colonel, still talking angrily to himself, scratched a match and
lighted one of the lamps. Then he divested himself of his collar and tie,
threw his coat and waistcoat on a chair, and reseated himself, to take
off his boots.
All at once they heard him utter a loud exclamation of disgust.
“What on earth is the matter with that lamp?” he cried. “That comes of
having hired help from the city. Never look after things, unless you keep
right after them. How many times have I spoken about having these lamps
filled every day!”
The colonel scratched a match. “Hulloa,” he exclaimed, “it’s full, after
all. Well, I see, the wick hasn’t been trimmed. There’s always something
wrong.” The colonel proceeded to scrape the wick. Then he scratched
another match. The wick sputtered as he held the match to it.
“Confound the thing!” yelled the colonel, now utterly out of temper. “The
thing’s bewitched. Where’s that other lamp? Oh, there it is. We’ll see if
that will burn. I’ll discharge that housemaid to-morrow.”
He scratched still another match, held it to the wick of the other lamp,
and was evidently satisfied with that, for they heard him replace the
lamp-chimney and go on with his undressing.
In a few minutes more there came another eruption from the colonel.
“There goes the other one,” he yelled. “I know what’s the matter.
Somebody’s been fooling with those lamps. I’ll make ’em smart for it.”
The colonel unscrewed the part of the lamp containing the wick, took the
bowls of the lamps, one by one, over to his window, opened them, and
poured the contents of the lamps out upon the veranda.
“Water!” he yelled. “Water! That’s what’s the matter. Oh, but I’d just
like to know whether it’s that pale-faced Burns boy, or some of those
other young imps in the house. I’ll find out. I’ll make somebody smart
for this. Wasting my oil, too. I’ll make ’em pay for it.”
The colonel set down the lamps, rushed out of his room into the hall for
the lamp that usually occupied a standard there. He did not find it,
because Henry Burns had taken the pains to remove it. The colonel made a
sudden dash for Henry Burns’s door, rattled the door-knob and pounded,
and then, finding that in his confusion he had failed to discover that it
was unlocked, hurled it open and burst into the room.
What the colonel saw was the pale, calm face of Henry Burns, peering out
at him from the bed, as that young gentleman lifted himself up on one
elbow. Around his forehead was bound the handkerchief, which he had
wetted in the bowl of water. The lamp burning dimly completed the picture
of his distress.
“Hi, you there! You young—” The colonel checked himself abruptly, as
Henry Burns slowly raised himself up in bed and pressed one hand to his
forehead. “What’s the matter with you?” roared the colonel, completely
taken aback by Henry Burns’s appearance.
“Oh, nothing,” said Henry Burns, resignedly. “It’s nothing.”
The colonel little realized how much of truthfulness there was in this
answer.
“Did you want me for anything?” asked Henry Burns, in his softest voice.
“No, I didn’t,” said the colonel, sullenly. “Somebody has been fooling
with my lamps, and I—I thought I would use yours, if you didn’t mind.”
“Certainly,” replied Henry Burns. “I may not need mine again for the rest
of the night.” Again he pressed his hand dismally to his forehead.
“I won’t take it!” snapped the colonel. “You may need it again. Why don’t
you tell Mrs. Carlin you’ve got a headache? She’ll look after you. It’s
eating too much—eating too much, that does it. I’ve always said it. Stop
stuffing two pieces of pie every day at dinner, and you won’t have any
headache.”
With this parting injunction, the irate colonel abruptly took his
departure, slamming the door behind him.
Henry Burns dived beneath the bedclothes and smothered his roars of
laughter. The colonel, disappointed in his quest for a lamp, and not
caring to search further in his present condition of undress, returned
once more to his room and finished undressing in the dark.
“I’ll make somebody smart for this to-morrow,” he kept repeating. “Like
as not that little white-faced scamp in the next room had some hand in
it. I can’t quite make him out. Well, I’ll go to bed and sleep over it.”
The colonel rolled into bed.
There was a crash and a howl of rage from the colonel. He floundered
about in a tangle of bedclothes for a moment, filling the room with his
angry ejaculations, and endeavouring, helplessly, for a moment, to
extricate himself from his uncomfortable position on the floor. Then he
arose, raging like a tempest, stumbling over a chair in his confusion,
and nearly sprawling on the floor again.
He rang the electric button in his room till the clerk in the office
thought the house was on fire, and came running up, breathless, to see
what was the matter.
“Fire! Who said there was any fire, you idiot!” shrieked the colonel, as
his clerk dashed into the room and ran plump into him. “There isn’t any
fire,” he cried. “Somebody’s been breaking the furniture in here; tearing
down the beds, ruining the lamps. Get that room on the next floor, down
at the end of the hall, ready for me. I can’t stay here to-night. Don’t
stand there, gaping like a frog. Hurry up. Get Mrs. Carlin to fix that
bed up for me. She’s gone to bed, do you say? Well, then, get somebody
else. Don’t stand there. Go along!”
The clerk hurried away, as much to prevent the colonel seeing the broad
grin on his face as to obey orders. The colonel, stumbling around in the
darkness, managed to partly dress himself; and, five minutes later, the
boys heard him go storming along the hall to the stairway, which he
mounted, and was seen no more that night.
The closet door in Henry Burns’s room swung softly open, and there rolled
out helplessly on the floor four boys, choking with suppressed laughter,
the tears fairly running down their cheeks.
Henry Burns, calm as ever, quietly arose from bed, removed the bandage
from his brow, slid into his clothes, and remarked, softly, “I feel
better now.”
“Oh, don’t, Henry,” begged George Warren. “If you say any more I shall
die. I can’t laugh now without its hurting me.”
“You need something to eat,” said Henry Burns. Pinning a blanket up over
the transom to hide the light, and stopping his keyhole, to prevent any
ray of light from penetrating into the hallway, and throwing down a
blanket at the door-sill for the same purpose, Henry Burns lighted both
his lamps, carefully locked his door, and made ready to entertain his
guests.
“It’s not just according to the rules of etiquette,” he said, producing a
package from the basket, “but we’ll have to start on the ice-cream first
before it melts. Then we’ll work back along the line, to salad and ginger
ale.”
He drew forth from the package, which proved to be a box filled with
chopped ice, a small brick of ice-cream. It was beginning to melt about
the edges, but they made short work of it.
“Now,” said Henry Burns, “if you please, we’ll start all over again. Here
are the sandwiches.”
“It’s the finest spread I ever had,” said young Joe, appreciatively, as
he stowed away his fourth sandwich and helped himself to an orange.
“Joe always goes on the principle that he may be cast away on a desert
island before he has another square meal,” said Arthur, “so he always
fills up accordingly.”
“It’s a good principle to go on,” responded Henry Burns. “George, you
open the ginger ale.”
So they dined most sumptuously, and had gotten down to nuts and raisins,
when Henry Burns, whose ears were always on the alert, suddenly sprang
up, with a warning “Sh-h-h,” and, quickly stepping across the room,
turned the lamps down, signalling at the same time for the boys to be
silent.
Not one of the others had heard a sound; but now they were aware that
soft footsteps were pattering along the hallway.
Presently some one came to Henry Burns’s door, turned the knob, and
rapped very gently.
Not a sound came from the room.
Then a voice said: “Henry, Henry.”
There was no reply.
“Strange,” said the person outside; “I could have sworn that I heard his
voice as I came up. Well, I must have been mistaken. He seems to be sound
asleep. I guess his headache is better.”
They heard the footsteps die away again along the hallway.
“Whew!” said Henry Burns; “that was a narrow escape. That was Mrs.
Carlin. Somebody must have told her I was sick. She sleeps all night with
one eye and one ear open, they say.”
“Well,” said George Warren, “I reckon we’d better take it as a warning
that it’s time to be going, anyway. It’s eleven o’clock, I should say,
and we have got to get up early and overhaul the _Spray_. She’s up at
Bryant’s Cove yet, and we have got to bring her down and have a new
bowsprit put in, and reeve some new rigging. We’ve had a great time,
Henry. Count us in on the next feed, and give our regards to Colonel
Witham. Come on, boys.”
“Sorry to have to show you out the back way,” said Henry Burns, “but the
front way would be dangerous now, and my lightning-rod staircase seems to
be the only way. It’s a very nice way when one is used to it; but look
out and don’t slip.”
By the time the last boy was on the roof, Henry Burns was half-undressed;
and by the time the last one had reached the ground, his light was out
and he was half-asleep. That was Henry Burns’s way. When he did a thing,
he did it and wasted no time—whether it was working or playing or
sleeping.
CHAPTER V.
A HIDDEN CAVE
It was a little after eleven o’clock when Tom left the hotel. His mind
was so occupied with the events of the evening that he started at once
toward his camp, forgetting an intention he had earlier in the night of
visiting the locality of Jack Harvey’s camp in search of the missing box.
He stopped every few minutes to laugh long and heartily, as, one by one,
the mishaps of Colonel Witham came to his mind.
All at once he remembered the missing box. He had nearly reached his tent
by this time, but he stopped short. He called to mind the contents of the
box; among other things, a certain big cake, with frosting on it, and,
although he and Bob, as young athletes, were bound to hold such food in
little regard, there was one thing about it which particularly impressed
him just now, and that was the remembrance of how he had watched Bob’s
sister, with her dainty little fingers, mould the frosting on the top,
and how she had slyly wondered—as if there could be any doubt of
it—whether they, meaning Tom, would think of her while they were eating
it.
The thought of that cake falling into the hands of Jack Harvey and of Tim
Reardon and the others of Harvey’s crew, and of the jokes they would
crack at Tom’s expense, made his blood boil. He started in the direction
of Harvey’s camp, then turned back to get Bob to accompany him,—and then
paused and went on again, saying to himself that he would not awaken his
chum at that hour of the night. He started off through the woods alone.
The night was warm and pleasant, though it was quite dark, as there was
no moon. He passed by the cottages, and then turned into a foot-path that
followed the windings of the shore. The path led for some distance
through a thicket of alders and underbrush, from which at length it
emerged into an open field. Crossing this, Tom again entered a growth of
wood, the path winding among the roots of some old hemlocks and cedars.
All at once he saw a light shining indistinctly through the trees, and
knew that it must be in the immediate vicinity of Harvey’s camp.
“So much the better, if they are up,” muttered Tom. “If they’re sitting
around that fire they are sure to be talking.” He hurried on in the
direction of the light, still following the path.
The fire soon became plainly visible. At a point where the path divided
he could see the white tent, lit up by a big fire of driftwood that
blazed in front of it. He could hear the sound of voices, and
distinguished that of Harvey above the others. There seemed to be some
insubordination in camp, for Harvey’s tones were loud and angry.
Tom concluded not to take the path to the left, which was the one leading
direct to the camp, but continued on for a distance along the main path.
It was well he did so, for presently he heard some one coming toward him.
The paths were at this point so near together that he could not
distinguish which one the person was taking; so he drew aside and
crouched in the bushes, which were very dense between the two paths. A
boy, whom he recognized as Tim Reardon, soon came in sight, and passed
close by the spot where Tom was concealed. He carried a pail in his hand,
and was evidently going to a spring near by for water. He was grumbling
to himself as he passed along.
“I’m always the one!” he said. “Why don’t he make some one else lug the
water part of the time? I’m not going to be bullied by any Jack Harvey,
and he needn’t think I am.”
He kept on to the spring, however. Tom remained where he was, and Tim
soon returned, carrying the pail filled with water. Tom waited till he
saw Tim arrive at the camp and deposit the pail of water near the fire,
before he again emerged from the clump of bushes into the path that led
past the camp. He followed this cautiously. He could not as yet see
whether all the members of the crew were present about the camp-fire, and
he knew that to encounter any one of them at that hour near the camp
would not only put an end to all hopes of recovering the box, by
revealing to Harvey and his crew that he suspected them of having stolen
it, but that, once an alarm being given, he should have the whole crew at
his heels in a twinkling.
Tom was sufficiently acquainted with the reputation of Harvey’s crew to
know that it would go hard with him if they found him there. He stole
quietly along past the camp some little distance, and then, turning from
the path, got down on his hands and knees and crept toward the camp
through the bushes.
Near the camp was a hemlock-tree, with large, broad, heavy branches, that
grew so low down on the trunk that some of them rested on the ground. It
offered a place of concealment, and Tom, at the imminent risk of being
discovered, reached it and crawled in between the branches. If the
campers had been expecting any one, and had been on the watch, he must
surely have been discovered, for several times branches cracked under
him, and once so loudly that he thought it was all up with him, expecting
them to come and see what had made the noise. But they took no notice of
it, either because they were accustomed to hearing noises in the woods,
of cattle or dogs, or thought nothing at all about it.
From where he now lay, Tom could see the entire camp, and hear everything
the boys said. It was a picturesque spot which Harvey had chosen. The
land here ran out in one of those irregular points which was
characteristic of the shores of the island, and ended in a little,
low-lying bluff, that overlooked the bay. On the side nearer the village,
the shore curved in with a graceful sweep, making a perfect bow, and the
land for some distance back sloped gradually down to the beach. The beach
here was composed of a fine white sand, making an ideal landing-place for
rowboats. On the side farther from the village, the waterfront was of a
different character. It rounded out, instead of curving in, and the shore
was bold, instead of sloping. It was not easily approached, even by small
boats, as the water, for some distance out, was choked up with reefs and
ledges, which were barely covered at high tide, and at low water were
exposed here and there.
This apparently unapproachable shore had been taken advantage of by
Harvey in a way which no one in the village had ever suspected. There was
a channel among the reefs, which a small sailboat could pursue, if one
were accurately acquainted with its windings. With this channel, which
they had discovered by chance, the campers had become thoroughly
familiar, at both low and high water.
The point had been cleared of undergrowth, and most of the larger trees
had been cut down for some little distance back from the water. In the
rear of this clearing there were thick woods, extending into the island
for a mile or more.
The campers had pitched a big canvas tent at the edge of the clearing,
where they lived in free and easy fashion, cooking mostly out-of-doors.
They scorned the idea of making bunks, as smacking too much of
civilization, and at night slept on boughs covered with blankets. They
lived out-of-doors in front of the tent when the weather was pleasant,
and, when it was stormy, they went aboard the yacht and did their cooking
in the cabin, over a small sheet-iron stove.
It was altogether a romantic and picturesque sight that Tom saw as he
looked out from his hiding-place. At a little distance from the tent the
fire was blazing, while the members of the crew either sat around it or
lay, stretched out at full length, upon the ground. A pot of coffee was
placed on a flat stone by the side of the fire, near enough to get the
heat from it, and the delicious odour of it as it steamed made Tom
hungry.
The members of Harvey’s crew were utterly without restraint, saving that
which was imposed capriciously by Harvey himself. Harvey was not
naturally vicious. His mind had been perverted by the books he had read,
so that he failed to see that his acts of petty thievery were meannesses
and acts of cowardice of which he would some day be ashamed.
He fashioned his conduct as much according to the books he read as
possible, and, if he had been but trained rightly, would have been proud
to do courageous things, instead of playing mean jokes, for he had at
heart much bravery. He rarely wore a hat, and was as bronzed as any
sailor. The sleeves of his flannel blouse were usually rolled up to the
elbows, showing on his forearms several tattooed designs in red and blue
ink. He was large and strong.
The boys around the fire were telling stories and relating in turn
incidents of adventure that had taken place since their arrival on the
island. At the close of their story-telling, they arose and began making
preparations for a meal. Near by the fireplace they had built a rough
table, of stakes driven into the ground, and boards, with benches on
either side of it, fashioned in the same way. Two of the boys went to the
tent and brought out some tin dishes, and the steaming pot of coffee was
taken from the stone and set on the table.
Then Joe Hinman, taking a long pole in his hand, went to the fire and
proceeded to scatter the brands about, while a shower of sparks rose up
and floated off into the forest. Presently Joe raked from among the
embers a dozen or more black, shapeless objects. These he placed one by
one on a block of wood and broke the clay—for such it was—with a hatchet.
The odour of cooked fish pervaded the camp and saluted Tom’s nostrils
most temptingly. Inside of the lumps of clay were fish of some kind,
which Tom took to be cunners. As fast as they were ready, Tim Reardon
carried them to the table, where they were heaped up on a big earthen
platter.
The boys then fell to and ate as though they were starving. Tom wondered
for some time if this could be their usual hour for supper; but
remembered that he had seen the _Surprise_ several miles off in the bay
that evening, and concluded that the evening meal had been long delayed.
The _Surprise_ now lay a few rods offshore, with a lantern hanging at her
mast.
The boys continued to talk, as they ate, of tricks they had played and of
raids they had taken part in, down the island. In fact, the good citizens
of Southport would have given a good deal for the secrets Tom learned
from his hiding-place that night. Tom waited impatiently, however, for
some mention of the missing box. Could he be mistaken in suspecting them
of having taken it? No, he was sure not. That they were capable of doing
so, their own conversation left no room for doubt. Tom felt certain the
box was in their possession.
But he began to feel that his errand of discovery to-night would be
fruitless. They must, he argued, have some sort of storehouse, where they
hid such plunder as this, but no one had as yet made the slightest
mention of it. It was clearly useless for him to grope about in the
vicinity of the camp at night, and he began to think it would be better
after all to wait until day and select a time for his search, if
possible, when all the members of the crew were off on the yacht. But
that might come too late, and Tom wondered what to do.
All at once Joe Hinman made a remark that caused Tom to raise himself
upon his elbow and listen intently.
“Boys,” said Joe, “I’ve got a little surprise for you.”
The crew, one and all, stopped eating, rested their elbows on the table,
and looked at Joe curiously.
“I’ll bet it’s a salmon from old Slade’s nets,” said George Baker. “Joe’s
sworn for a week that he’d have one.”
“He’s all right, is Joe,” remarked Harvey, patronizingly. “There isn’t
one of you that can touch Joe for smartness.”
Thus encouraged, Joe told how he had seen the box that had been a part of
Tom’s and Bob’s luggage left on the wharf the night it arrived; how he
had ascertained that it contained food, by prying up the cover; and how,
early on the following morning, he had rowed up under cover of the fog,
and had brought back the box to the camp.
“It’s down in the cave now,” said Joe. Tom gave a start. “There’s a
meat-pie in it that is good for a dinner to-morrow, and a big frosted
cake, if you fellows want it to-night.”
“Hooray!” cried Jack Harvey. “You and I will go and get it.” Whereupon he
and Joe sprang up and made directly for the spot where Tom lay, passing
by so close that he could have reached out and touched them, and hurried
along the bank, down to the shore.
Tom allowed them to get well in advance before he ventured to crawl from
his hiding-place and follow them. He saw them at length disappear over
the bank at a point where there grew a thick clump of cedars. He turned
from the path into the woods, made his way cautiously past the place
where he had seen them disappear, turned into the path again, and then
climbed down the bank, which was there very steep, holding on to the
bushes, and looked for the boys, but they were nowhere to be seen.
Tom knew they could not have passed him. They had not reappeared over the
edge of the bank, and they were nowhere in sight along the shore. There
could be but one conclusion. The entrance to the cave must be located in
the clump of cedars.
It seemed to Tom that he had waited at least a quarter of an hour,
though, in fact, it was not more than five minutes, when he saw the boys
reappear. Tom groaned as he saw the big cake in Joe’s hand. Joe laid it
down on the ground, while he and Jack picked up several armfuls of loose
boughs lying about, and threw them up carelessly against the bank. Then
Joe took up the cake again, and they emerged from the cedars, climbed up
over the bank, and disappeared in the direction of their camp.
Tom lost no time in scrambling to the spot. The hiding-place was
cunningly concealed. It was an awkward place to crawl to from any part of
the bank, and no one would have thought of trying to land there in a
boat. The entrance to the cave might have been left open, with little
chance of its ever being discovered. Tom threw aside the boughs
sufficiently to discover that beneath them was a sort of trap-door, made
of pieces of board carelessly nailed together. Then he replaced the
boughs and, without even attempting to lift the board door, regained the
path at the top of the bank.
“There’ll be time enough to explore that later,” he muttered. “I’m not
the only one that will have lost something out of that cave before
morning, though.” He made his way cautiously past the camp once more, and
then started on a run for his own camp. His hare and hounds practice at
school stood him in good stead, and he did not stop running till he had
come to the door of his tent. He unfastened the flap and entered, panting
for breath. Bob was sleeping soundly. He shook him, but Bob was loath to
awake, and resented being so roughly disturbed.
“Wake up, Bob! Wake!” cried Tom, shaking him again.
Bob opened his eyes. “Why, is it morning, Tom?” he asked.
“No, it isn’t, Bob, but it soon will be. I’ve found the box, Bob.
Harvey’s got it, and I know where it is hidden,—down near his camp in a
cave.”
Bob shivered, for Tom had pulled the blanket off the bed, and the moist
sea air penetrated the tent. He dressed, stupidly, for he was not fully
rid of his drowsiness.
The boys went down to the beach, and Bob washed his face in the salt
water.
“I’m all right now, Tom, old fellow,” he said, “but, honest, Tom, I feel
ugly enough at being waked up, not at you, though, to just enjoy a fight
with those fellows.”
“There’s little prospect of that, if we are careful,” answered Tom. “What
we want to do is to show them we are smart enough to get the box back,
and, perhaps, play them a trick of our own.”
Then they carried the canoe down to the shore, launched it, and set off.
It was about one o’clock in the morning. They paddled away from the tent
and down along the shore, noiselessly as Indians. Past the village and
past the cottages, and not a sign of life anywhere, not even a wisp of
smoke from a chimney. The canoe glided swiftly along, making the only
ripples there were on the glassy surface of the bay.
As they came to the beach near Harvey’s camp, they landed, and Tom crept
up over the bank to reconnoitre. He came back presently, reporting that
the crew were all sound asleep, and everything quiet around the camp.
Then they paddled quickly by the end of the bluff and along the bold
shore beyond, picking their way carefully among the reefs, as they could
not have done in these unknown waters with any other craft than the
buoyant canoe.
They disembarked at the clump of cedars, and made the canoe fast to the
trunk of one that overhung the water. Tom took from the bow of the canoe
a lantern, and they scrambled up the bank. Throwing aside the boughs,
they disclosed the trap-door, which they lifted up. Tom lit the lantern
and they entered the cave.
They found it much larger than the opening indicated. It was excavated
from the hard clay of which the bank was composed, and, though not high
enough for them to stand quite erect, it was about eight feet long and
five feet wide.
It was filled with stuff of all sorts. There were spare topsails
and staysails,—possibly from coasters that had anchored in the
harbour,—sets of oars from ships’ boats, several boxes of canned goods,
that the grocer of the village had hunted for far and wide, coils of
rope, two shotguns, carefully wrapped in pieces of flannel and well
oiled, to prevent the rust from eating them, four lanterns, two axes and
a hatchet, and odds and ends of all descriptions useful in and about a
camp or a yacht.
The roof of the cave was shored up with boards, supported by joists. In
one corner of the cave was the box for which they sought, broken into,
and with the gorgeous cake gone; but that was all. The rest of the
contents were untouched.
They took the box, carried it down to the shore and placed it in the
canoe. Tom started to return to the cave.
“What are you going to do now, Tom?” queried Bob. “We don’t want to take
anything of theirs, of course.”
“Not a thing,” answered Tom. “We don’t go in for that sort of business,
but I just want to show them that we have been here and had the
opportunity to destroy anything that we were of a mind to. Perhaps it
will teach them a good lesson. It will show them that we are as smart as
they are, anyway.”
So saying, Tom began to gather up the guns, the good sails, the boxes of
provisions, and other things of value, and carry them outside the cave,
setting them down on the bank at some distance from the mouth of it.
“We won’t destroy anything of value,” said Tom. “But here are some odds
and ends of old stuff, some of these pieces of oars, empty crates,
bagging, and that sort of thing, which will make a good blaze, and which
would have to be thrown away some day. They are of no use to anybody. I
propose to make a bonfire of these in the cave, just to show Jack Harvey
that we have been here. He’ll find all his stuff that’s good for anything
put carefully outside the cave, and no harm come to it. But he’ll be just
as furious to find his cave discovered and on fire, for all that.”
“All right,” said Bob, “here goes.”
Bob was thinking of that cake.
Tom took one of the axes and chopped a small hole in the top of the cave,
some distance above the door.
“That will make a draught,” he said, in answer to Bob’s inquiry.
Then he blew out the lantern and poured the oil with which it was filled
over the pile of rubbish. There was still a small heap of stuff in one
corner of the cave, some old boards, and a few pieces of sail, thrown
carelessly in a pile, as though of no value. They did not stop to bother
with these, as they seemed of no consequence, and they were in a hurry.
Tom struck a match and set fire to the heap that he had accumulated.
“We can’t get away from here any too soon, now, Bob,” he said. “There’ll
be some furious chaps out here, when that fire gets to crackling and
smoking. We don’t care to be about here at that time. They are too many
for us.”
The boys scrambled down the bank, got into the canoe, and pushed off. As
they paddled away, the light of the fire gleamed in the mouth of the
cave. As soon as they had gotten clear of the reefs, they did not stop to
reconnoitre the camp, but pushed by at full speed. It was a race against
fire—and they little dreamed of its swiftness, nor of the hidden force
which they had let loose.
Along the shore they sped, speaking not a word till they had got the
village in sight and their arms were cracking in the joints. Then they
paused a moment for breath, for their little craft was out of sight of
the camp now, in the dull morning light.
Tom, who had the stern paddle, had looked back from time to time, but if
there was any light to be seen through the bushes it was very slight. The
spot was hidden now, too, by the intervening point of land.
“I don’t know whether I see a light or not,” he said. ”There’s a lot of
smoke, though, and I can imagine, anyway, that I see a gleam of fire in
the midst of it.”
The words were scarcely out of his mouth before he swung the canoe around
with one quick sweep of his paddle.
“Look, Bob! Look!” he cried. “What have we done?”
The sight that met their eyes was amazing.
A sheet of flame shot suddenly into the sky. It looked like a tiny
volcano, belching up fire and débris and pushing up through the midst of
it a great black canopy of smoke. This was followed by the report of an
explosion that echoed and reëchoed through the village, reverberating on
the rocks across the harbour, and filling the whole country around with
its noise—at once startling and terrifying. Then the light as suddenly
went out, a shower of burning sticks and shreds of blazing canvas drifted
lazily down through the air, and a cloud of smoke hung over the spot.
Tom and Bob trembled like rushes. It seemed as though every particle of
strength had left them. There could be but one conclusion. They had blown
up the camp. Harvey and all his crew were, perhaps, killed.
Bob was the first to speak.
“Come, Tom,” he said. “We must get to camp before we are seen. Brace up
and try to paddle.”
Somehow or other they got to camp and dragged the canoe ashore. They
carried the box up to the tent and locked it up in the big chest. Bob’s
hand trembled so he could hardly put the key into the lock.
Tom seated himself, dejectedly, on the edge of one of the bunks, the
picture of despair.
“I guess I may as well go and give myself up first as last,” he said. “I
suppose I’ll have to go to jail, if they’re killed. What can there have
been in the cave? I didn’t see anything to explode, did you?”
“No,” answered Bob, “unless it was something over in that pile of stuff
in one corner. I didn’t examine it, but they must have had something
stored or hidden underneath there, either kerosene or gunpowder. By Jove!
Tom, I remember now hearing Captain Sam Curtis say he had missed a keg of
blasting-powder that he had bought for the Fourth of July, and he said he
thought some of the sailors down the island had stolen it. That’s where
it went to; it was hidden in that corner.”
“That doesn’t help matters much, if they’re all dead,” said Tom. “I’ll be
to blame, just the same. Oh, Bob, what shall I do?”
“Whatever you do,” answered Bob, “I stand my share of it, just as much as
you. I’m just as guilty as you are. But don’t go to pieces that way, Tom.
We don’t know yet whether they are hurt or not. The best thing we can do
is to get down there as quick as ever we can. Shall we take the canoe and
make a race for it?”
“I can’t do it,” answered Tom. “I haven’t got the strength,—and, to be
honest, Bob, the courage. It’s taken every bit of strength and nerve out
of me. Bob, I tell you, I’m afraid we’ve killed them,—and I, for one,
don’t dare to go and look.”
And Tom hid his face in his hands, while the tears trickled through his
fingers.
“I don’t believe they’re killed,” said Bob, stoutly. “They were some
distance away from the cave, you know. Come, we’ll go with the crowd, for
the whole town must be out by this time.”
And so he half-persuaded, half-dragged Tom away from the tent, and they
started for the hotel.
The explosion had, indeed, aroused every one. Men were running to and
fro, and the greatest excitement prevailed. The news quickly spread that
some frightful accident had happened at Harvey’s camp, and Tom and Bob
heard expressions of sympathy for them on all sides, from many who had
been the victims of their tricks, and who had time and again wished the
island rid of them. A rumour spread among the crowd of villagers—no one
knew where it originated—that a keg of powder, which the campers had left
to dry near the fire, had exploded, and blown them all to pieces. This
was only one of a number of wild rumours that were noised about that
morning in the confusion and uncertainty. It was generally believed that
the crew must have been killed.
Tom and Bob hung on to the edge of the excited crowd, which had assembled
in front of the hotel, and listened to these various expressions with
horror. Then, when the crowd moved on for the camp, they followed, with
sinking hearts.
It was a strange procession that went down along the shore that morning.
There were cottage-owners, who had grievances against the crew;
villagers, who had been tormented and tricked by them time and again; and
fishermen, who had lost many a tide’s fishing, because their dories had
been found sunk alongside the wharf, with heaping loads of stones aboard.
Yet, now that disaster had befallen the crew, they were one and all
willing to condone the offences, and anxious to render what help they
could.
They went on rapidly. Tom and Bob soon heard a cry from those in advance
that the tent was still standing. Then hope rose in Tom’s heart, that
spurred him forward.
He dashed ahead, rushed past the leaders, cutting through the woods where
the path made a circuit. There was the tent still standing, and
apparently uninjured by the storm of stones and débris that had rained
down about it. But the crew! Not the sound of a voice was to be heard.
Not a soul was stirring anywhere in the locality.
CHAPTER VI.
JACK HARVEY INVESTIGATES
Tom’s heart sank as he approached the tent, stepping over stones and
fragments of wood that lay all about. Pulling open the flap of the tent,
he looked anxiously inside. There lay the crew, to a man, stretched upon
the ground, motionless. A sudden fear seized on Tom that the shock had
killed them as they lay sleeping, and he reeled and clutched one of the
guy-ropes to keep from falling.
The next minute the crowd of villagers had arrived, and several heads
were thrust inside the tent. Just at that moment one of the crew slowly
raised himself on an elbow and said, angrily:
“What’s all this fuss about? Aren’t you people satisfied with trying to
blow us up, without coming around and making such a rumpus and keeping us
awake?”
It was Jack Harvey. The others of the crew, taking their cue from him,
made a pretence of rousing themselves up from sleep, yawned and rubbed
their eyes, and asked what was wanted.
Then, perceiving for the first time that there were several stalwart
fishermen in the party, and not daring to go too far, Harvey added, in a
sneering tone:
“Oh, we’re obliged to you all for coming down here. It wasn’t curiosity
on your part—of course not. You came down because you thought we were
hurt, and we’re much obliged to you. Of course we are. We’re glad to see
you, moreover, now we’re awake. Wait a minute, and we will stir up the
fire and boil a pot of coffee.”
This was maddening to the rescuers. Some of the fishermen suggested
pitching in and giving the crew a sound thrashing; but, so Squire
Brackett said, “there was really no ground for such a proceeding, though
he, for one, would be more than glad to do it.” They could blame
themselves for trying to help a pack of young hyenas like these. For his
part, he was going back home to bed. “They’ll drown themselves out in the
bay if let alone,” he commented. However, he ventured the query to
Harvey: “Guess you boys had a little powder stored around here, didn’t
you?”
“Guess again, squire,” answered Harvey, roughly. “Maybe we had a fort
with cannon mounted on it,—and maybe we’d like to go to sleep again, if
you people would let us. We’re not trespassing. We’ve got permission to
camp here, so don’t try to go bullying us, squire.”
This was the satisfaction, then, that the rescuers got at the hands of
the crew. They had come, burying their grievances, and with hearts full
of sympathy and kindness for the unfortunate boys, and they had
encountered only the same reckless crew, that mocked them for their
pains. So they turned away again, angry and disappointed, and nursing
their wrath for a day to come.
And then, as the sound of the last of their footsteps died away through
the woods, Jack Harvey, chuckling with vast satisfaction to himself,
said: “Wasn’t that fine, though? Wasn’t old Brackett and the others
furious?”
“Wild!” exclaimed Joe Hinman. “But I don’t think, after all, Jack, that
it paid. We ought to have treated them better, after they had come all
the way down here to help us.”
“Pshaw!” answered Harvey. “Don’t you go getting squeamish, Joe. For my
part, I’m mad enough at somebody to fight the whole village. There’s our
cave that it took us weeks to dig, and hidden in the only spot around
here that couldn’t be discovered, gone to smash, with everything we had
in it. Those two guns that the governor bought me were worth a pretty
price, let me tell you. They must have gone clear into the bay, for I
can’t even find a piece of the stock of either one of them.”
“It looks to me as though somebody did discover the cave, after all,”
said Joe Hinman. “You can’t make me believe that it blew itself up.”
“Nonsense!” exclaimed Harvey—and then he paused abruptly; for, of a
sudden, there came sharply to his mind the white face of Tom Harris,
peering in at the tent door, with a haggard, ghastly expression. He
recalled how Tom had started back and nearly fallen at the sight of the
crew lying still.
“He was the first one at the tent, too,” muttered Harvey to himself.
“What’s that?” asked Joe Hinman.
“Nothing,” said Harvey. “But you may be right, Joe. You may be right,
after all. Come, let’s all go out and look over the ground once more.
There may be a few things yet, to save from the wreck.”
The explosion, strangely enough, had not injured a single member of the
crew. Not a piece of the wreckage had struck the tent. Pieces of rock and
bits of branches and boards lay on every hand about the camp, and a
stone, torn from the bank, had crashed down on the bowsprit of the
_Surprise_, breaking it short off, carrying away rigging and sails. There
was also a hole broken in the yacht’s deck by a falling piece of ledge.
The crew, awakened from sound slumber by the awful crash and by the
shower of earth and stones, had rushed out, frightened half out of their
wits, and at an utter loss at first to know what had happened. The full
discovery of what had occurred only served to deepen the mystery. How it
had happened no one could tell. To be sure, they knew what had escaped
the notice of Tom and Bob, that four lanterns in a corner of the cave
were filled with kerosene oil, and that in another corner, in a hole
under the floor, covered with a few pieces of board and a thin sprinkling
of earth, were two kegs of blasting-powder.
It had been a narrow escape for them. A hole was torn in the bank big
enough to hold several yachts the size of the _Surprise_. Not a vestige
remained to show that a cave had ever been dug there. Several boulders
had been dislodged from the bank and carried bodily down to the water’s
edge, besides the one that had hit the bowsprit of the _Surprise_. Of the
stuff that Tom and Bob had placed carefully outside the cave, not a scrap
remained. Every bit of it must have been blown into the sea. But not a
rock nor so much as a stick had struck the tent. Beyond being dazed for
some moments by the shock of the explosion, not one of the crew was hurt.
When they had made a second and unavailing search for anything that might
have escaped the destruction, and some half-hour after the villagers had
departed, the crew went back to the tent and laid themselves down again
for a morning’s nap. They were soon off to sleep, save one.
As often as he closed his eyes, Jack Harvey could see, in his mind’s eye,
Tom Harris come again to the door of the tent; and he could see him start
back and almost fall. Could Tom Harris have had anything to do with the
explosion? And if so, how? It hardly seemed possible, but Harvey could
not put the idea out of his head. Tom’s frightened face looked in at him,
in his troubled sleep that morning, and, long before his crew were awake
again and stirring, he rose and stole out of the tent to the shore, where
the cave had been.
And so, while Tom and Bob rolled in on to their bunks that morning,
thankful in their hearts that no harm had come to the crew, Jack Harvey
was down there by the shore, examining the ground over and over again,
every inch of it, from the place where the entrance to the cave had been
to the place where the canoe had been made fast. Much of the bank had
been torn away there, but where the canoe had been moored there was a
spot for some few feet that was undisturbed. Jack Harvey, after studying
the spot carefully, went back to camp. If he had found anything that
surprised him, he did not, for the present, mention it to his crew.
Jack Harvey was a curious mixture of good and bad qualities. His parents
were wealthy, but uneducated and unrefined. They allowed him to have all
the money he wished to spend, and permitted him to do pretty much as he
pleased about everything. Harvey’s father had been a miner, and had
“struck it rich,” after knocking about the California gold-fields for
nearly a score of years. Because he had managed to get along well in the
world without any education, and without the influence of any restraint,
such as society imposes, he had a theory that it was the best thing for a
boy to work out his own upbringing. As a consequence, his son was rarely
thwarted in anything. Left to himself, Harvey, though not naturally bad,
fell in with a rough, lawless class of boys, read only the cheapest kind
of books, which inspired him to lead an idle, good-for-nothing life, and,
as a result, went wild.
He was strong and, among his associates, a leader. They gladly awarded
him this distinction, as they were, for the most part, poor, and he spent
his allowance freely. He was captain of a ball nine, for which he bought
the uniforms and the necessary equipment; captain of his yacht’s crew,
and, in all things, their acknowledged leader. His companions came
generally to be known as Harvey’s crew.
Tom and Bob had a mere speaking acquaintance with him, as they all
attended the same school at home,—from which, however, Harvey was more
often truant than present. Beyond that association they had nothing to do
with him. There were four members of the yacht’s crew, although that term
was applied by the people of the town to some dozen or more boys. Of
these four, Joe Hinman was a thin, hatchet-faced, shrewd-looking boy,
whose father was employed by a railroad in some capacity that kept him
much away from home; George Baker and Allan Harding were cousins, whose
parents had a rather doubtful reputation, as dealers in second-hand goods
and articles pawned, at a little shop in an obscure quarter of the town.
Tim Reardon had no parents that he knew of, and earned an uncertain
living, doing chores and working at odd jobs through the winter. In the
summer, he was usually to be found aboard Harvey’s yacht, where he was
fairly content to do the drudgery, for the sake of the livelihood and the
fun of yachting and camping.
It was not the sort of companionship that a wise and careful parent would
have chosen for his son, but they sufficed for Harvey, and no one
interfered with him. These boys did as he said, and that was what he
wanted.
Nearly every one in the entire village had gone down to Harvey’s camp in
the next hour following the explosion. Curiously enough, however, Henry
Burns was not of this number. He had jumped out of bed at the crash and
the shock, and had hastily dressed and rushed down-stairs, ready to go
with the crowd. For once, however, Mrs. Carlin got ahead of him.
“Why, Henry Burns,” she had exclaimed, catching sight of him as he dodged
out of the door. “Where do you think you are going at this hour of the
night, and you that was feeling so bad only a few hours ago. You’re not
going off through those woods to-night, not if I know it. You can just
take yourself back to bed, if you don’t want to be laid up with a sick
spell.”
And Henry Burns, now that attention was thus publicly attracted to him,
did not dare to steal out later and join the others, lest Mrs. Carlin
should hear of it, and, perchance, become suspicious of him. So he went
back unwillingly to bed, but not to sleep. He was wide-awake when the
angry party returned. Listening from his window, he heard their
description of the explosion and their impudent reception by Harvey’s
crew; and proceeded to draw his own conclusion from it all.
The more he thought of it, the more his suspicion grew that, in some way,
Tom or Bob, or both, had had a hand in the thing. Tom, indeed, had
expressed his intention to Henry Burns of spying on the camp in his hunt
to find the missing box; and, although it seemed a most unlikely hour for
him to have gone down there, Henry Burns wisely conjectured that that was
what he must have done.
Accordingly, shortly after Henry Burns had arisen that morning, and after
he had gathered from a few villagers who were abroad some fuller details
of the night’s adventures, he made his way to the camp on the point.
There were no signs of life about the camp, and, softly opening the flap
of the tent, he peered within. Tom and Bob lay stretched out, sound
asleep.
Henry Burns stepped noiselessly inside. He called them by name in a low
tone, but they did not awaken.
“Last night’s excitement was too much for one of them, at least, I
guess,” was his comment. And then he added: “If my suspicions are true,
their fun lasted later than mine, and was far more exciting—but I’ll find
that out.”
There was a camp-stool beside each bunk, upon which Tom and Bob had
thrown their clothes before turning in. Henry Burns quietly removed the
clothing from these chairs, made them into a bundle, and, tucking the
bundle under his arm, walked out of the tent and lay down on the grass,
just outside.
It seemed to him as though another hour had passed before he heard a
creaking of one of the bunks, and a voice, which he recognized as Bob’s,
said: “Hulloa, there, Tom, wake up!”
“Ay, ay,” growled Tom, sleepily, but made no move.
Again Bob’s voice: “Say, Tom?”
No answer.
“Tom—hulloa, old fellow—come, let’s get up. It’s late.”
“All right, all right, Bob, so it is.” And Tom roused up on an elbow and
rubbed his eyes. Then he gave a prodigious yawn.
“Whew!” he exclaimed. “What a night I had of it. I don’t wonder we slept
late, do you?”
“Well, hardly,” answered Bob. “My! But I can hear that explosion go off
now, it seems to me. And wasn’t that an awful sight when the flame shot
up against the sky? I’ll never forget it as long as I live.”
“We’ll have to keep our eyes on Harvey after this for awhile,” said Tom.
“Hulloa!” he exclaimed, suddenly, as they tumbled out on to the floor.
“Where are our clothes? We left them right here when we turned in, didn’t
we?”
The boys looked at each other and stared in astonishment.
“Of course we did,” answered Bob.
“What can it mean?” gasped Tom.
“Hope to die if I can guess,” said Bob. “It’s plain enough, though, that
some one has been in here while we were asleep and cleaned out our
wardrobe. Not a thing left. You don’t suppose that Harvey—”
“Nonsense,” interrupted Tom. “It’s that young scoundrel of a Joe Warren.
He’s always up to his monkey-shines. It’s some of his doings. He was the
one, mind you, that proposed yesterday that we carry our change of good
clothing up to his cottage for safe-keeping. Here we are, now, without a
rag to put on.”
“I suppose he thinks we’ll have to march up to his cottage in blankets,
like Indians,” said Bob. “Well, if it comes to that, I’ll stay right here
till night. You don’t catch me parading around in a blanket in the
daytime, to be laughed at by everybody.”
“We’ll have to pay him up for this,” said Tom.
At this moment Henry Burns appeared at the doorway.
“I have some cheap second-hand clothes here,” he said. “They’re pretty
well worn out, and you can have them for a small consideration, seeing
that you need them so bad. I want the money for my poor mother, who’s
sick at home with the smallpox.”
“Scoundrel!” yelled Tom.
“Pirate!” muttered Bob.
They rushed fiercely at Henry Burns, who, however, smiling serenely,
still held on tightly to the bundle of clothing.
“Pay me my price for them, and you can have them all,” he said.
“How much?” asked Tom.
“Wait till we try them on and see if they still fit,” said Bob.
“My price,” answered Henry Burns, depositing the bundle on a chair and
seating himself upon an end of one of the bunks, “is that you tell me how
you came so near to blowing up Jack Harvey’s camp last night.”
It was a long shot on his part, but it went straight to the mark. There
was an awkward silence for almost a minute. Finally Tom said:
“There’s no use trying to keep a secret from him, Bob. He knows half
already. We may as well tell him all, and see what he thinks of it.”
“Fire away, Tom,” said Bob. “No one was injured, anyway, so no great harm
can come of it.”
So Tom related to Henry Burns the story of the night’s adventure. Henry
listened with the greatest interest.
“I’d have given a good deal,” he said, “to see Jack Harvey when he found
his cave blown up, with all their spoils along with it.”
When the story was finished, however, he was inclined to treat the matter
more seriously than they had supposed he would.
“I’m afraid it’s a bad scrape to be in,” he said at length. “From what I
have heard about our friend Harvey, I judge he is not one of the kind to
let a thing of this sort go without paying somebody back for it. And I
believe he is as sure to find out who blew up that cave as I am that I am
sitting here.”
“How can that be?” asked Bob.
“I can’t say,” replied Henry Burns; “but if you keep your eyes open, you
will see that he suspects you. I’ll warrant if we could see Jack Harvey
now, we should see him out examining every inch of the shore, looking at
the rocks on the beach for any paint that might be scraped off your
canoe, and all such things as that. He is a shrewd one, and, when he has
once satisfied himself that you and Tom wrecked his cave, why, I wouldn’t
give a fig for your camp here,—that is, unless you propose to stay at
home all the time to guard it.”
Strange to say, if they could have seen Jack Harvey just then, they would
have witnessed a most startling confirmation of Henry Burns’s words. For
Jack Harvey, at that moment, was at the shore once more. He was examining
every inch of it. He was scrutinizing every rock along the beach. He was
out among the ledges, looking carefully along their sides. He was
searching here, and he was searching there,—but what he found he neither
confided to his crew nor to any one else, but kept locked for the present
in his own breast.
“I believe Henry is right,” said Tom. “And it isn’t the most pleasant
prospect to think that our camp may be overhauled at any time, whenever
we happen to be away, and perhaps disappear altogether some dark night,
if we happen to be caught out on the bay or down the island. But what to
do I don’t see, for the life of me,—except to keep as quiet as possible
about it.”
“I may not be right,” suggested Henry Burns, “but my advice would be to
do just the opposite,—that is, when you once feel certain that Harvey is
hunting for you.
“Tell Harvey,” continued Henry, “that you blew up his camp, and how you
did it, and why. Tell him what you saw in that cave. Ask him point-blank
if he would want the villagers to know what you saw in there. Strike a
bargain with him to call it even. He will be glad to do it; whereas, if
he finds you and Bob out, without your knowing what he is up to, he will
watch night and day for a chance to harm you.”
“The fact is,” added Henry Burns, as he arose to go, “what with Jack
Harvey and Colonel Witham on the war-path after you, you are likely to
have quite a lively summer before you get through. So keep your eyes open
and look out. And remember, when in trouble, always apply to H. A. Burns,
care Colonel Witham—always ready to serve you.” And Henry Burns walked
away, whistling.
Tom and Bob went about their breakfast preparations, looking rather
serious for a time; but a hearty meal made them look at the matter
somewhat less seriously.
“Henry Burns is quite apt to be right about things, so the Warrens say,”
commented Tom, after awhile, as they were finishing their meal. “But I
guess he likes to talk some, too, just to make an impression. I don’t see
how Harvey can find out who blew up his cave in a hundred years, if we
only keep quiet and don’t give it away ourselves.”
“I’m not so sure,” answered Bob. “Those things do get out.”
Jack Harvey, in the meantime, having completed a careful survey of the
shore, and either finding or not finding what he sought for, went back to
his camp and crew. Toward noon, however, he left his camp, and a little
later Tom saw him coming up along the shore.
When he came to where the canoe lay on the beach, Harvey paused and
examined it closely. Then, as though to test its weight, he lifted it up
on his broad shoulders, and then set it down on the beach again, this
time bottom up.
Tom and Bob started down to the shore at this, but, before either they or
Harvey had spoken, they had seen plainly that which, perhaps, Harvey had
looked for, a long broad scratch upon the bottom of the canoe, near the
middle, where the fresh paint had been scraped off.
“Hulloa, there,” said Harvey, as they approached. “That’s a fine canoe
you’ve got there. Guess I’ll have to get the governor to buy me one. I
saw your tent yesterday, but didn’t have a chance to come around. You
fellows got ahead of me, by coming over last night—with the crowd.”
“Yes,” answered Bob. “We expected to find you all blown into the sea.
What was the matter over at your camp?”
“Why, between you and me,” replied Harvey, eying them cautiously as he
spoke, “I think some one of the crew did it, as a joke. They’re up to
that sort of thing, you know. They’d just as lieve do it as not, any one
of them. Like as not that young Tim Reardon did it, because I make him
lug water, and don’t let up on him when he has lazy spells. To tell you
the truth, we had a little powder stored away in a hole under a tree, and
I guess one of them touched it off.”
Harvey tried to speak carelessly; but there was an angry light in his
eyes and an expression around his mouth which would not be concealed, and
which boded no good for somebody, and this was not lost on Tom and Bob.
“Come up to the camp, won’t you?” asked Tom. Harvey first declined, as
though it had not been his intention to stop, and then accepted, and the
three went toward the tent. On the way there Tom found a chance to say to
Bob, “I guess Henry Burns was right, wasn’t he, Bob?” And Bob answered,
“Yes.”
“Snug quarters you have here,” said Harvey, as they entered the tent.
“Tight and dry,—and bunks, too. We can’t beat these accommodations aboard
the _Surprise_. And here’s camp-chairs, like a steam-yacht or a cottage.
You’ll be having pictures on the walls next, and a carpet on the
floor,—and then you won’t allow each other to have mud on your boots.”
Harvey was still watching them sharply as he spoke, and may have made the
last remark with a purpose, inasmuch as the boots of both Tom and Bob
were begrimed and smeared with the clay from the bank near Harvey’s camp,
and their clothes, for that matter, were muddy in spots.
“Sure enough,” answered Tom, “we have things as shipshape as we can.
We’ve got a camp-kit here that can’t be beaten on the island. Maybe you
would be interested to have a look at it.” So saying, Tom deliberately
unlocked the big packing-case and threw back the cover.
“There,” cried Tom, pointing to the box that had been stolen, “what do
you think of that?”
Harvey drew back quickly, and looked as though he were about to strike
Tom a blow, while his face flushed angrily. Bob sprang quickly from his
seat on one of the bunks, and he and Tom stood confronting Harvey. If the
latter had intended to strike a blow, he changed his mind and did not do
it. Instead, he gave a half-laugh and said:
“That’s what I came up to see you about. The fact is, I have known you
fellows blew up our cave ever since I saw your face”—looking at Tom—“at
the door of our tent last night. Then I found, too, where your canoe had
landed on the edge of the shore, and just where that big scratch was
made. The paint is on the rocks yet. Now I don’t think you fellows used
me square, though I know you did it because you thought we stole your
box—”
“Which you did,” interrupted Tom.
Again the quick flush in Harvey’s face, and again the gesture as though
he would strike Tom a blow; but he did not do it, as he had refrained
before.
“No, there’s where you are wrong,” he said; “though I don’t deny that one
of the crew took it,—not knowing it was yours. They wouldn’t one of them
take anything from you.”
“Which is not true,” said Tom, quietly.
This was more than Harvey could stand. With clenched fist, he rushed at
Tom, aiming a heavy blow at his face, and crying, as he did so: “I lie,
do I? Then take that!”
Tom partially avoided the blow by stepping back and guarding his face
with one arm. The blow fell short, striking him near the shoulder. At the
same time, however, he tripped over the packing-case, and that, with the
force of the blow, sent him over backwards, so that he fell all in a heap
in one corner of the tent.
Harvey darted for the door, to make his escape; but Bob sprang at him and
the two clinched. Harvey was larger and more than a match for either one
of them, and, with a quick twist, threw Bob violently to the floor. But
the latter clung to him and brought him down, too. Then, before Harvey
could break Bob’s hold, Tom had recovered himself and thrown himself upon
him. He rolled Harvey over, and the next moment he and Bob had him
securely pinned to the floor.
“Now,” said Tom, as they held him fast, “we are not going to hurt you,
Jack Harvey, because we are no such cowards; but I’ve got something to
say to you which it will be for your advantage to listen to.
“In the first place, let me tell you that you are a coward and as good as
a thief. You didn’t steal our box because one of your crew did it for you
and saved you the trouble; but you knew it was stolen from us, and would
have taken it yourself if you had had the chance. You need not tell us
that your crew would not steal from us, for we know better, and so do
you. In the second place, I want to tell you that we blew up your cave
without intending to do more than burn some of the things in it. The rest
we took out,—though it doesn’t make much difference now what our
intentions were.
“And, last of all, let me tell you that neither you nor your crew are
going to try to be revenged on us. Why? Because you don’t dare to. It
wouldn’t be healthy for any of you, if it became known in the village
what was in that cave, and nobody knows that better than you. Not that
Bob and I intend to tell, ever, unless you give us cause to. But let me
tell you that it won’t do for you to play any tricks on us.
“Please don’t forget that neither you nor a single one of your crew dares
to disturb so much as a rope around this camp. Now you can get up.”
Harvey rose, white with rage, and stood for a moment, as though undecided
whether or not to continue the unequal combat; but his better judgment
prevailed, and he walked slowly out of the tent, pausing at the door long
enough to say:
“You need not have any fear of our troubling you or your camp. You have
been too smart for us, and we shall steer clear of you after this.
“In fact,” he added, sneeringly, “any little thing we can do for you at
any time, just let us know. We shall think a great deal of two such smart
fellows as you, I assure you.” And so saying, he left them.
“Sorry we can’t say as much for you,” Bob called out after him, and was
half-sorry for the words the next moment; for it was foolish to increase
an enmity which could only lead to trouble.
CHAPTER VII.
SQUIRE BRACKETT’S DOG
The island got a respite of at least a week, after the explosion, from
excitement of any sort. A calm like that of the primeval days before the
“boom” pervaded all the settlement. But it was not to endure. One morning
a little fishing-schooner, which had fallen into the hands of Squire
Brackett, through a mortgage which he had foreclosed upon a poor skipper
across the bay, and which was now lying at anchor in the harbour, was
found painted with broad stripes of blood red, and flying the skull and
cross-bones at the masthead, a veritable pirate craft.
The squire was never able to discover whether the authors of this piece
of mischief were the boys or some of his own townsmen, who, indignant at
his seizure of the only means of livelihood belonging to the unfortunate
skipper, had roundly denounced Squire Brackett for his meanness. However,
the incident resulted in the squire leaving on the boat one day for the
city of Benton to make a purchase.
What the squire purchased he brought back with him the next day. And, as
it is a matter of passing interest how his purchase arrived at the island
and how brief a time it remained there, it shall be here recorded. By the
same boat there came to the village an individual whose arrival made no
stir, but who remained long enough to create the greatest excitement the
village had ever known.
The arrival of the steamer from Benton was an event of great interest
daily, for it brought not only mysterious packages, bundles, and messages
from fathers whose business kept them in the city, but now and then a new
face, which was duly scrutinized and commented upon by the summer
colonists before its possessor had crossed the gangplank.
So that on this day when Squire Brackett returned to his native isle
there were many gathered upon the wharf, though, it is hardly necessary
to say, not for the purpose of welcoming his return. Yet one might
readily believe the squire thought otherwise; since, as the steamer
neared the wharf, this self-important individual, arrayed in a suit of
shining black, with a great deal of staring shirt-front, and with an
enormous slouch-hat surmounting his ponderous head, seemed the most
conspicuous person aboard.
The squire stood nearest the gangway, and, indeed, it looked from a
distance as though the other passengers, in recognition of the greatness
of this island magnate, had drawn respectfully back a little distance, to
wait till he should have gone ashore ere they approached the railing.
As the steamer came nearer, however, the reason for this seeming
deference on their part became apparent. It was plainly not due so much
to any awe inspired by the squire as it was to fear,—fear of the squire’s
purchase. The squire’s purchase was as ugly and vicious looking a bulldog
as ever walked on four legs. The squire held the dog by a stout piece of
cord, which was wound several times about his wrist.
The dog and the squire, being each in equally ill-humour, may have found
their companionship agreeable. Certain it was that the squire was the
only person whom the dog did not snarl and snap at. It growled and
snapped at every one, and even snarled and showed its teeth at the
good-natured cook aboard the steamer, who had offered it a scrap of meat.
This surliness on the part of his new acquisition had particularly
pleased the squire, who argued from it that here was an incorruptible
beast, that would meet in the same spirit any such advances upon the part
of strangers when it should be duly installed as guardian of his
farmhouse.
The squire would be magnanimous on this occasion, however, and, despite
the fact that the crowd on the wharf looked to him, as it always did in
his eyes, like invaders of his domain, he gave a bow accompanied by a
sweeping gesture of his hand, presumably intended to be a patronizing
greeting, which should include everybody, and nobody in particular, at
once.
Then the steamer made its landing. It was not always an easy matter here,
for the tide at certain times ran swift, and seemed to strive fiercely to
drive the boat away from the wharf. Therefore, when the steamer was as
yet at some distance from the wharf, a deck-hand at the bow skilfully let
fly a coil of small rope, which unwound in the air and was caught by a
man standing on the wharf. To an end of this rope was attached the usual
heavy hawser, which was then drawn on to the wharf by means of the small
rope, and the bight thrown over a spiling. In like manner the other big
hawser was drawn up astern on to the wharf.
When things were done shipshape, it was the rule of the steamer that the
small rope should be coiled again and at once thrown back to the boat
while one end was still fast to the wharf, so that when the hawser was
cast off from the spiling it could be drawn aboard by the small rope,
without its splashing down into the water and getting wet.
But things were more often done hurriedly than shipshape at the Southport
landing. The steamer’s crew had all they could do usually to land freight
and get it out quickly enough, so that the boat could go on down the bay
without losing time. The line thrown to the wharf was usually caught by
the village storekeeper, who had little time to spare, or by whatever man
or boy happened to be standing near at hand. The boat’s rule was seldom
obeyed. Scarcely any one ever took the trouble to coil up the small rope
and throw it back. When the hawsers were cast off they fell into the
water, regardless of the fact that they thereby got wet and became
heavier, dragging the small ropes after them, and were hauled aboard as
the boat steamed away.
The steamer having, on this occasion, been made fast to the wharf and the
gangplank put out, Squire Brackett crossed it, dragging his purchase
behind him,—the purchase skulking very unwillingly across the plank and
showing its teeth at the crowd upon the wharf.
The squire hated and despised boys, and made it a point to ignore them
whenever it was possible. For this very reason they delighted to annoy
him by hailing him whenever they met him. Young Joe Warren had a way of
driving the squire nearly into fits by pretending to mistake him for one
Captain Kendrick, who was the bitterest enemy the squire had, and then
always apologizing for his mistake by explaining to the squire that he
could not tell them apart.
“Good morning, Squire Brackett, glad to see you back again!” cried Henry
Burns, in the heartiest fashion imaginable, as the squire stepped on to
the wharf.
“Humph! Morning—morning,” grunted the squire, as he eyed Henry Burns
suspiciously.
Henry Burns smiled most affably, as though the squire had been his
dearest friend and adviser.
“Why, how do you do, squire?” said George Warren, cordially.
Squire Brackett scowled angrily at him, but answered, “How d’ye do?” as
short as he could.
Just then young Joe made his appearance.
“How are you, Captain Kendrick?” he bawled, loud enough to be heard all
over the wharf.
The crowd began to smile, and young Joe added, hastily:
“Oh, I beg pardon, Squire Brackett—always take you for Cap’n
Kendrick—strange how you do look so much alike.”
“You little idiot,” yelled the choleric squire, “I’d Cap’n Kendrick you
with a rawhide, if I had the say of you,—insulting an honest man with a
name like that,—every one of you ought to be in State prison. And you,
you’re the worst one of all, Jack Harvey,” pointing to the latter, who
had just come upon the wharf. “And you, too!” shaking his fist at Tom and
Bob. “You’re sly, but you’ll get caught yet. You’re a pack of young
rascals, every one of you. Don’t any of you come around my house, if you
don’t want to be chewed up. Here, you brute! Quit that!”
The dog had snapped viciously at a child that ran past, causing her to
scream with fear.
Just then the freight-agent called out to the squire:
“You’ll have to come in here and see about this freight of yours,” he
said. “It’s all mixed up. And don’t bring that dog in here, or the crew
may take him for a piece of freight and run a truck against him.”
At one corner of the freight-house on the wharf was a big iron ring, to
which the squire tied the dog.
“I wouldn’t advise anybody to meddle with him,” he said; but the advice
seemed hardly necessary, for the dog showed its teeth and sprang savagely
at any one who ventured to come near.
There were some expressions of indignation that such a dangerous brute
should be brought to the island.
Every one did keep as far out of the dog’s way as possible, excepting Tim
Reardon, who, after a whispered consultation with Jack Harvey, after
which the latter disappeared behind the freight-house, seated himself
just out of the dog’s reach, and caused that animal to froth at the mouth
and nearly strangle itself in trying to get loose, by pointing a finger
at the dog and making a loud hissing noise between his teeth.
Not content with this form of annoyance, Tim Reardon varied it now and
again by darting a hand out at the dog, as though in an attempt to seize
him by the throat. To which the maddened animal, with true bulldog
ferocity, responded with savage rushes as far as the rope would permit,
his wide-open jaws fairly dripping with rage and disappointment.
If there was any design on the boy’s part to distract the dog’s attention
from what Jack Harvey was doing at the corner of the freight-house, to
which the dog was tied, it succeeded admirably. Moreover, it is certain
that, when Harvey reappeared, Tim stopped teasing the brute, and he and
Harvey walked around to the rear of the freight-house.
The freight-house was situated almost at the end of the wharf on its
seaward side, so near to the edge of the wharf that there was only room
for a single person to walk along on the outside, and that at the risk of
losing one’s balance and falling off the wharf. The ring to which the dog
was tied was on the side near the end, and was not visible to those
standing on the front of the wharf. Any one going around to the further
side of the freight-house at this moment might have seen Harvey and Tim
standing there,—Harvey nearest the ring and holding a knife in his hand.
The steamer in landing had made a complete circuit in the harbour, and
had come alongside the wharf with her head pointing out into the bay, so
that now, as Captain Chase called out “All aboard,” and gave orders to
cast off bow and stern lines, the boat was ready to steam directly away
from the wharf. The gangplanks were drawn in. There was a tinkling of
bells; a great commotion as the steamer’s wheels began to revolve
rapidly; a general waving of handkerchiefs from the wharf to those who
were bound farther down the bay; the steamer began to glide away from the
wharf, when suddenly somebody shrieked:
“The dog! The dog! Run! Run! He’s broken loose.”
And before the crowd had time to scatter, the dog, infuriated with the
tormenting it had received at the hands of Tim Reardon, dashed toward it.
Men, women, and children fled in terror. Squire Brackett, who came
running out of the freight-house, did not dare face the dog, but dodged
back into the freight-house and slammed the door shut, in a cold sweat of
fear.
The boys, most of them, rushed for points of safety, clambering up the
ends of the spiling that jutted above the floor of the wharf, and young
Joe and Tom Harris, being at the very edge of the wharf, and having no
other means of escape, and nothing to defend themselves with, dropped off
the wharf into the water and swam to shore. Several of the other boys and
some men scrambled about for clubs to ward off the brute’s fierce rush.
Among these latter was Henry Burns. Realizing on the instant that to
attempt to flee was worse than hopeless, he had glanced about for
something to defend himself with, and had seized upon a broken piece of
oar. Grasping it with both hands, he stood, calmly awaiting the attack.
The dog, seeing him right in his path, rushed at him, and when within a
yard of the boy suddenly gave a spring, as though to seize him by the
throat.
Henry Burns, summoning all his strength, aimed a terrific sweeping blow
at the dog, but it missed its mark. Meeting no obstruction, the force of
the blow swung the boy completely around, so that he lost his balance and
fell sprawling upon the wharf, while the piece of oar flew from his hands
and landed far out in the water.
A strange thing had happened. The crowd, pausing breathlessly in the
midst of flight, had seen with horror the dog spring at Henry Burns; but
the animal’s leap had a most extraordinary termination. All at once the
dog was jerked violently backward through the air, and fell heavily on
the wharf, yelping with surprise and fright. Then it was dragged rapidly
across the wharf, and the crowd yelled with derision as they saw that the
rope by which the dog had been tied to the ring had been unfastened or
cut from the ring, and had been fastened to the rope which had been
thrown from the steamer, and the other end of which was made fast to the
steamer’s hawser.
As the boat steamed away it drew the rope after it. There was no possible
escape for the dog. Struggling as best it could, barking and yelping, and
snapping madly at the rope, it braced itself for one instant on the edge
of the wharf, and then was dragged over and fell, still struggling, to
the water below. The steamer kept on its way a short distance, and then
stopped. The rope was drawn in by a deck-hand and the dog hauled to the
railing of the steamer, but it was not taken aboard, for nobody on board
wanted a dead dog. The deck-hand cut the rope, and the body splashed into
the water.
Thus perished the squire’s bulldog, unmourned, save for the squire
himself, who raged about the wharf, looking for some boy whom he might
accuse of the trick, and vowing untold vengeance upon the perpetrators of
it. But, one and all, they had wisely dispersed, the guilty and the
innocent alike, and the squire was soon left alone in his wrath.
Who had done the thing? The crowd did not know, for it had been too
excited to notice that Jack Harvey and Tim Reardon had emerged from
behind the freight-house just at the critical moment when the dog had
sprung at Henry Burns.
As for Henry Burns, he was the hero of the hour.
There had been on the whole so much excitement attending the squire’s
arrival that few had noticed a stranger who had come ashore soon after
Squire Brackett. He had not waited on the wharf, but had gone directly to
the hotel. There Henry Burns met him later; for the man sat at Colonel
Witham’s table, as that was the only one then available.
The new arrival was the sort of guest to please the colonel, for he was
extremely quiet. He walked only with the aid of a cane, and then,
apparently, with great effort, stopping frequently to rest. He told them
he had been very ill; that his health had broken down with overwork, and
he had accordingly tried cruising along the coast. His friends had left
him up the river some days before, and would call for him.
He was a man a little under middle age, of medium height and thick-set,
with black hair and a pale, smooth-shaven face. He was evidently somewhat
a man of the world and had travelled abroad, for, seated before the
fireplace in the office that evening, he talked for some time of his
travels.
But there were other things of more interest to the boarders than this
quiet, reserved stranger, who did not play cards and who hobbled about
with a cane. There was, above all, a morning paper from town, which
bristled with startling head-lines, descriptive of a robbery of the
residence of one of the richest men in the town. It told how the thieves,
three in number, had entered the house where Mr. Curtis, the owner, was
sleeping alone, in the absence of his family; how they had put a pistol
to his head and made him get up and open a safe, from which they had
taken several hundred dollars in money and a jewel-case containing a
diamond necklace and other gems to the value of several thousand dollars.
The jewels, it said, were the property of Mrs. Curtis, and most of them
had been bridal presents. A reward of $500 was offered for their return
or for information leading to the arrest of any one of the robbers.
The article stated further that Mr. Curtis was positive he could identify
the man who subsequently bound and gagged him, his mask having but
partially concealed his face. He was, he said, a man of about medium
height, with black hair, black moustache, and heavy black beard,
broad-shouldered, thick-set, and unusually active and powerful.
All this, as it was read aloud, threw the guests into the greatest
possible excitement, as a great part of them were from the very town and
knew the Curtis family, by reputation if not personally.
It did not, of course, interest the stranger guest, for he nodded in his
chair and nearly dozed off several times during the reading. Still, when
the guests had dispersed, he picked up the paper from a chair and took it
with him to his room.
It was the very next night following that of his arrival that Henry Burns
met with a surprise.
On the night in question there was a full moon about half-past ten
o’clock, and, as Henry had agreed with Tom and Bob to meet them at their
tent, he opened his window, stepped out on to the ledge and started to
climb to the roof.
Mackerel had struck in at the western bay, and the boys had planned to
paddle down the island that night, carry their canoe across the short
strip of land that saved the island from being cut into almost equal
halves by the sea, launch it again in the western bay, and paddle around
to where the Warren boys’ sloop lay anchored in Fish Hawk’s Cove. Then
they were all to try for mackerel early in the morning.
Henry Burns stepped softly out, grasped the lightning-rod, and, with a
quickness that would have amazed the worthy Mrs. Carlin, scrambled to the
ledge over the top of his window. There he paused a moment for breath,
and then climbed up the lightning-rod, hand over hand, and gained the
roof.
He had proceeded then across the roof but a little ways, when he heard
suddenly, almost directly beneath him, the sound of footsteps. Some one
was coming up the stairs that led to the roof.
Henry Burns had barely time to conceal himself behind a chimney when the
trap-door in the roof was softly opened, and he saw the head and
shoulders of a man emerge through the opening. Henry Burns lay flat on
the roof, in the dark shadow cast by the chimney. The moon shone full in
the man’s face, and Henry Burns saw, to his amazement, that it was the
stranger guest. The sickly, weak expression in the man’s face was gone,
and in its stead there was a sinister, bold look, which seemed far more
natural to his powerful physique.
Suddenly the man, with the strength and ease of an athlete, sprang
lightly out on to the roof. He still carried his cane, but he had no use
for it, save to clutch it in one hand more after the manner of a cudgel
than a cane.
Henry Burns, for once in his life, was afraid. It was all so strange and
incomprehensible.
Once upon the roof, the man straightened himself up, threw out his chest
and squared back his broad shoulders. He was erect in stature, without
the suggestion of a stoop. He seemed to exult in the freedom of the
place, like one who had been kept in some confinement. When he walked
across the roof to the edge facing the sea, there was no suggestion of
any limp in his gait. It was quick and firm, but noiseless and almost
catlike.
What did it mean? Henry Burns thought of the robbery. Could the man have
had anything to do with that? Why had he pretended to be weak and ill?
Why had he come to this out-of-the-way place, pretending that he was an
invalid? Surely he could have no designs upon any one on the island.
There was no house there that offered inducement to a robber, if the man
were one.
It must be that his coming was an attempt to hide himself away—to secrete
himself. But why? The description of the robber that had bound Mr.
Curtis—did that tally with the appearance of this man? Broad shoulders,
medium height, active, powerful,—all these agreed. But the black
moustache and heavy beard. The stranger’s face was smoothly shaven. That
transformation, however, could have been quickly effected.
One thing was certain. It would not be well that this man, a pretended
invalid, but strong, and armed with a heavy cane, that had suddenly
become transformed from a cripple’s staff to a cudgel, who could but have
some dark motive in thus disguising and secreting himself, should find
himself watched and his secret discovered. Henry Burns crouched closer in
the shadow of the chimney, and hardly dared to breathe. The evil that he
had so accidentally uncovered in the man, his own helplessness compared
with the other’s strength, and the dangerous situation, there upon the
house-top, made him afraid. If they had been upon the ground he would
have feared less.
The man scanned the moonlit waters of the bay long and earnestly. His
survey done, he paced a few times back and forth, swinging the cane, and
then, stealing noiselessly to the doorway, disappeared down the stairs,
closing the trap-door after him.
Henry Burns lost little time in descending to the ground. On the way to
the boys’ camp that night he made two resolves: first, that he would keep
to himself, for the present, at least, the stranger’s secret; second,
that, whatever that secret was, he would find it out if any clue was to
be had upon that island. The second resolution, he thought, rather
included the first, since, the greater the number of those who knew of
the stranger’s secret, the greater the chances of his suspicions being
aroused.
Another thing that disturbed Henry Burns not a little was the knowledge
that his excursions over the roof were now attended with greater risk
than ever. It would not do to encounter the stranger there unexpectedly.
What might not the man, suddenly aroused, and desperate, as Henry Burns
believed him to be, do to him, if he found himself discovered? A fall
from such a height must mean instant death, and who was there to suspect
that he had not fallen, if he should be found next day lying upon the
ground?
In the future he must know whether the roof were occupied or not before
he ventured upon it, and especially must he be careful when returning
late at night.
Henry Burns resolved to keep the man’s secret for a time, for the reason
that he was firmly convinced he had not come to the island to commit any
wrong there, but to hide away. The island offered every advantage for the
latter, and no inducement for the former. The man’s design certainly was
to secrete himself. Still, Henry Burns had no intention of letting the
man escape from the island. He would watch also for those friends that
the man had said were to come for him with their yacht, and he would make
sure that they did not sail away again. Though but a boy, the stranger’s
secret was in dangerous hands, if he had but known it. And yet luck was
to effect more than Henry Burns’s scheming.
Tom and Bob were waiting impatiently when Henry Burns arrived at the
tent. They launched the canoe, the three embarked, and soon left the tent
and then the village behind. They glided swiftly along the picturesque
shore till they came at length to the narrows; here they carried the
canoe across and launched it again in the western bay. In an hour from
the time they had left the tent, they had come alongside the sloop
_Spray_ in Fish Hawk’s Cove, and the Warren boys had sleepily made room
for them in the cabin.
It was crowded for them all there, and it may have been for that reason
that Henry Burns did not sleep soundly,—either that, or because of the
figure of a man that he could not drive from his mind, and that appeared
to him, half-dreaming and half-awake, as a figure that hobbled along,
stooping and bent, but which suddenly sprang up before him, lithe and
threatening, and brandishing in his hand a cudgel that looked like a
cane.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE HAUNTED HOUSE
At four o’clock next morning, when Arthur Warren tried to rouse the other
boys, they were loath to turn out. It was warm inside, under the
blankets, and the sea air outside was cool and damp. Out in the cockpit
Arthur lighted an oil-stove, which they always carried aboard, made the
coffee in a big pot, and set it on to boil. Then he called the sleepers
in the cabin again.
“Come you, Art, shut up out there! How do you expect any one can sleep,
with you bawling out in that fashion?”
This was from George Warren, whose voice denoted that he was only about
half-awake.
“Don’t want you to sleep any more,” answered Arthur. “Want you to get up
and fish.”
“Don’t care to fish,” said George, still only half-awake.
“Well,” persisted Arthur, “may I inquire what you did come over here
for?”
“Certainly you may. I came over here to sleep. I like the air over here.
Now, please don’t disturb us any more, Arthur. You can be decent, you
know, when you’ve a mind to be.” And with this request, drowsily mumbled,
George pulled the blanket comfortably about him and settled back for
another nap.
At this juncture, however, his brother poked his head in at the
companionway and yelled at the top of his lungs:
“Hulloa, there! Hulloa, I say! There’s a school of mackerel breaking off
the point. Wake up, every lazy lubber aboard!”
“Say, Art, you’re a mean scoundrel,” said George Warren, emerging once
more from the blankets. “You know there isn’t a mackerel in sight. I’ll
be just fool enough to look out of the window, though, so you can laugh,
so get ready.” And George looked sleepily out of the little cabin window.
He had no sooner done so, however, than he sprang up, exclaiming,
excitedly:
“There they are, sure enough. Boys, get up! Get up! There’s a school of
mackerel breaking off the point, as sure as we’re alive.”
The boys needed no further urging. They dressed and scrambled out on
deck. Not far away from the sloop could be seen plainly that tiny
chop-sea which is caused by the breaking of a school of mackerel. The
calm surface of the water was broken there by a series of miniature
ripples which could not be mistaken. The fish were there, but would they
bite?
“They are coming this way,” said Arthur. “We can soon reach them with the
throw-bait. We shall not have to leave the sloop.”
Hastily they got the bait out. It was a bucket filled with scraps of fish
and clams, chopped fine and mixed with salt water. Taking a long-handled
dipper, Arthur half-filled it with the bait and threw it as far as he
could out toward the school of fish.
The mackerel seized upon it greedily. From the sloop the boys could see
them dart through the water after it as it slowly sank. The water was
fairly alive with fish, ravenously hungry.
“Hurrah!” cried Arthur. “They’re hungry as sharks. Get the lines out,
quick.”
In a twinkling every boy had a line overboard; but, to their
disappointment, not a fish would bite. They still seized the throw-bait
that was cast out, but not one of them would take a baited hook.
“If that isn’t a regular mackerel trick, I’ll eat my bait,” said George
Warren. “Cap’n Sam said mackerel would often act that way, though I never
saw them when they wouldn’t bite before. He says they will play around a
boat for hours and not touch a hook, and, all of a sudden, they’ll
commence and bite as though they were starving.”
The boy’s words were unexpectedly verified at this moment by a sudden
twitch at his line and by corresponding twitches at all the other lines.
The fish had begun biting in earnest. The next moment the boys had three
or four aboard, handsome fellows, striped green and black, changing to a
bluish shade, and soon the cockpit seemed alive with them.
It was new sport for Tom and Bob, but they soon learned to tend two
lines, one in each hand; to drop one and haul the other in at a bite, and
to slat the mackerel off the hook with a quick snap, instead of stopping
to take them off by hand.
The mackerel bit fiercely, sometimes at the bare hook even, like fish
gone crazy. It seemed as though they might go on catching them all day
long, for the water was alive with them; but all at once the fish stopped
biting as abruptly as they had begun. They still played around the boat,
but not a fish would touch a hook.
“We may as well put up our lines, boys. They are through biting for this
morning,” said Arthur Warren. “Besides, we have more fish now than we
know what to do with.”
There was no doubt of that. They had caught several hundred of the
fish—enough to supply the village.
“We’ll make friends with every one in town,” said George Warren. “These
are the first mackerel of the season, and we will give away all we cannot
use.”
“I feel as though I could eat about four now,” said young Joe.
“I can eat at least six,” said Henry Burns.
“We’ll try you and see,” said Arthur, producing an enormous frying-pan
from a locker and a junk of pork from another. “Tom, you’re the boss cook
of the crowd. You fry the fish while the rest of us clean up the boat,
make things shipshape, and get ready to sail.”
“Ay, ay, sir,” said Tom, rolling up his sleeves. “Let’s see, four apiece
is how many?”
And soon the appetizing odour of the frying fish, mingled with that of
the steaming coffee, saluted most temptingly the nostrils of the six
hungry boys.
It was several hours after this, when the yacht was bowling along in the
western bay, near the head of the island, before a fresh southerly
breeze, that young Joe said:
“I know how we can play a stupendous joke on everybody in the village.”
Joe being the youngest of the brothers, and of the party, and it being
therefore necessary that he should be occasionally squelched, George
merely said:
“You don’t think of anything, Joe, but playing jokes.”
“All right,” retorted Joe, “seeing you are all so wildly enthusiastic,
I’ll just keep it to myself.”
“Nonsense, Joe, don’t be huffy,” said Arthur, whose curiosity was
aroused. “Tell us what it is, and if it is any good we’ll try it, won’t
we, boys?”
There being an unanimously affirmative reply, young Joe proceeded.
“Well,” said he, “there’s no risk at all about this. You know the old
farmhouse on the bluff across the cove? Everybody in the village believes
it is haunted. I found that out yesterday, when I was in Cap’n Sam’s
store. The house hasn’t been lived in for two years, and not a soul in
the village has dared to go near it at night in all that time. If any of
them had to stay over there all night, they would sleep out in the woods
rather than go into the house.
“You see, the house belonged to a man by the name of Randall, Captain
Randall, who lived there with his wife. This was a little more than two
years ago. He owned a little fishing-smack, in which he went short trips
down the coast. One night in a storm he drove in on to the bluff; the
smack was pounded to pieces, and he was drowned. His wife died not long
after.
“Since then, the villagers have thought the house haunted. They hear
shrieks from there during the night, and think they see strange lights in
the windows. They were discussing it in the store yesterday. Cap’n Sam
declared that, only a few nights ago, when he was coming across the cove
from Billy Cook’s, he saw the ghost of Captain Randall pass out of the
back door of the old house and disappear in the woods.
“Billy Cook, who lives up the cove, was in the store, too. He said he and
his wife hear screams come from there often in the night, especially when
it is storming; and two other villagers said they had seen lights in the
windows long after midnight.
“That new boarder at Colonel Witham’s was in there, too, Henry. He said
he knew houses were haunted, and told several stories about ghosts, which
he said were true. But I believe he knew they were lies, and he was only
amusing himself; but that’s nothing to do with the matter. The villagers
seemed to believe all that he said.
“Now, what I propose is, that we manufacture some brand-new ghosts for
them, some they have never seen before. There are some red and green
lights up at the cottage, that were left over from the Fourth of July,
which we can burn inside the house, after letting out a few screeches
that will arouse the village. Then we’ll wrap sheets around us and run
past the windows, while the lights are burning. We’ll have something
wrapped in white to fling off the cliff, too, in a flare of light.
“Then we’ll run down through the woods and take everything with us. And
if we don’t have some fun the next day listening to the ghost-stories
about the village, why, my name isn’t Joe, that’s all.”
“That’s not such a bad scheme, Joe,” said George.
“It’s a daisy,” said Henry Burns, “and easily done. What’s to hinder our
going up there to-night and taking up the lights and the sheets and
looking the place over? I never was inside the old house myself, though I
have been close to it at night, and never saw or heard of any ghosts. We
can carry a lantern up with us and light it after we get inside. If any
one sees the light from the village he will think it’s the ghosts walking
again.”
“I don’t like so much of this running around in the night,” said Tom,
flexing his biceps. “A fellow must have sleep to keep in condition, but I
guess they can count on us in this case, can’t they, Bob? It’s too good
to be missed.”
“You bet!” replied Bob. “We can turn in and sleep this afternoon. Count
me in, for one.”
“Then,” said George, “suppose we all start from our cottage at ten
o’clock to-night. We’ll launch the rowboat from the beach and slip across
and look things over.”
So it was agreed.
The yacht had long turned the head of the island and was beating down
alongshore in the eastern bay. Presently they rounded the bluff and came
into the cove. It was nearly noon.
High up on the bluff, and several rods back from the edge of the cliffs,
was the old farmhouse; it stood out conspicuously, though at some
distance from the water-front, for the land rose quite sharply and the
house occupied the top of the eminence. Around it, on all sides except
that facing the village, was a dark, heavy growth of hemlocks and pines.
It was a mysterious, shadowy place, even by day; but when darkness set in
about it, standing off solitary and alone, as it did, from the rest of
the village, with the waters lying between, it is little wonder that
superstition inhabited it with ghosts and that it was a spot to be
shunned.
At the outermost end of the cliffs that protruded into the bay, a ravine,
where the ledge at some time had been rent apart, led from the water up
toward the cottage, affording a precarious pathway. There was a natural
stairway of rock for some distance from the water’s edge, and at the end
nearest the old house a series of clumsy wooden stairs led up from the
ravine to the surface of the bluff. These were now old and rather
rickety; but a light person, at some risk, could still use them.
The villagers, as a rule, avoided the house and this pathway to the
bluff. If they had occasion to go ashore there, they usually landed
farther up the cove at a beach, and walked through the woods at a
distance from the house. No one cared to go very near it.
When the sloop had come to anchor in the cove opposite the Warren
cottage, the boys took a boatload of mackerel ashore, besides a basketful
in the canoe. They carried them around to every cottage in the village,
and even to the hotel, though, as George Warren remarked, they would have
to get Colonel Witham out of bed some night in a hurry to make up for it.
Certainly the village, supping that night on their catch, was inclined to
forget and forgive them many a prank that had been stored up for future
punishment.
When Henry Burns made his exit across the roof that night, he made a
careful survey before climbing out on it to see that the stranger was not
there. There were no signs of him, and Henry got away safely. Tom and Bob
were at the Warren cottage when he arrived. Everything was in readiness,
and they all set out for the shore.
“These clouds in the sky are favourable,” said Tom. “If it was as bright
as it was last night, we might have to postpone our trip. This mackerel
sky, through which the moon shines dimly, is just the thing.”
“Everything seems to be favourable,” added George, as they hurried down
the bank to the beach.
And yet not quite everything, for, when they had reached the shore and
came to look for the boat, it was not there.
“That’s too bad,” cried young Joe. “And we left it here at five o’clock,
too, after washing it out thoroughly, because we had brought the mackerel
ashore in it.”
“Who could have stolen it?” asked Tom.
“No one,” replied Joe. “Nobody ever has a boat stolen in this harbour.
Some one who wanted to cross the cove has borrowed it. We shall find it
all right in the morning,—but that don’t help us out now. It’s provoking
enough, and strange, too, after all, that the one who took it didn’t step
up to the cottage and let us know, as the cottage is so near. But boats
are almost common property here; any man in the harbour would lend us his
boat in a minute.”
“We must do the next best thing,” said Arthur, “and take one from the
slip at the wharf. No one will want his boat at this hour.”
“Though some one does seem to want ours,” broke in Joe. “Curious, isn’t
it, that whoever it is should come around into the cove and get our boat,
when there are any number at the slip?”
It certainly was rather strange.
Following Arthur’s suggestion, the boys proceeded to the slip and
embarked in a big dory, the property of Captain Sam. Then they rowed
quickly across the cove.
It took them but a few minutes to reach the other shore, for the cove was
smooth as glass. They headed for the bluff, and pointed directly into the
black, shadowy hole which they knew to be the natural landing-place. It
was a peculiar, narrow little dock, completely rock-bound, except for the
passage leading into it. It lay entirely in the shadow, but they had
landed there before, and knew just where to steer for a shelf, or ledge,
of rock that made a natural slip.
Still, their familiarity with the place did not prevent them from bumping
suddenly into a rowboat that lay moored there. They pushed it aside to
make a landing, and found to their amazement that it was their own.
“Hulloa!” cried George, springing out on to the broad, shelving ledge;
“that is queerer still. Here’s the old _Anna_, and what in the world is
she doing here? Who can have brought her? And what for? There’s something
strange about it. Why, there isn’t a man in the village that would dare
go near the haunted house at night, and yet somebody is over here now,
for some reason.”
If it were possible for Henry Burns to be excited ever, he was so now.
“Get in here, quick, George,” he said, “and don’t make any noise. I think
I know what it means, and I’ll tell you just as soon as we get out of
here. We can’t get away any too soon, either.”
“Why not take the _Anna_ out with us?” said young Joe, “and pay somebody
off for running away with it? He would only have to walk a few miles
around the cove to get back again—”
“No, no, leave the boat where it is,” said Henry Burns. “And let’s get
out of here quick.”
“Why, what’s the matter with you, Henry?” asked George, jumping back into
the boat and giving it a vigorous shove off. “Any one would think to see
you that some one was being murdered up there.”
Henry Burns’s
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/40548