Kitabı oku: «The Boy Scouts at the Canadian Border», sayfa 3
CHAPTER V
COMFORTING TUBBY
“Hey! What does this mean, knocking our house to flinders that way? Hold up, you, and tell us what you’re aiming at. A nice old farm bull you are, to be treating strangers so rough! Say, look at the dead leaves catching on fire, will you, boys!”
“Get busy, everybody!” called out Rob, already commencing to pull his shoes on as fast as he could, so that he might creep out from the wreckage of the brush shanty and prevent a forest fire from starting.
Andy followed suit. Tubby, not having been wise enough to keep his footwear close to his hand, had some difficulty in finding his shoes. Consequently when he did finally emerge, looking like a small edition of an elephant down on its knees, he found that the others had succeeded in gathering the scattered firebrands together again, and that some fresh pine was already flaming up, so dispelling the darkness.
Indeed, the growing warmth of the resurrected fire did not feel disagreeable in the least, for the night air was exceedingly chilly.
“Great Jupiter! Was that really a Jabberwock?” demanded Tubby, when he joined the other pair by the fire, holding out his chubby hands to the warmth as if the sensation felt very good.
“It was a bull moose,” replied Rob, without a moment’s hesitation.
“But what ailed the critter,” demanded Andy, “to make such a savage attack on our brush shanty, and dash through the half-dead fire like he did? That’s what I’d like to know. Rob, does a bull moose do such things always?”
“I’m sure I can’t say,” replied the other. “They are stupid creatures, I’ve always heard, and apt to do all sorts of queer stunts. It may be one of the animals could be taken with a mad streak, just as I’ve read a rhinoceros will do, charging down on a hunter’s camp, and smashing straight through the white tent as if he felt he had a special grievance against it. All I know is, that was an old bull moose, for I saw his big clumsy horns.”
Tubby shook his head, not yet convinced, and mumbled:
“I never saw a Jabberwock. I’m not sure there is any such strange beast in the world, but that didn’t resemble what I thought a moose was like.”
“You’ll have to prove it to him, Rob,” ventured Andy, “for when Tubby doubts he is like a wagon stuck in the mud: it takes a mighty heave to pry him loose.”
Thereupon Rob leaned forward and taking up a blazing brand that would serve admirably as a torch, he walked around until he found what he was looking for.
“Come here, both of you, and take a look at this track,” he told them.
“Huh! Looks like the spoor of a farmyard cow, only bigger. The cleft in the hoof is there, all right; so if a moose really did make that track, as you say, Rob, then they must belong to the same family of the cloven hoofs.”
“Here’s another bit of evidence, you see,” continued Rob, bent on rubbing it in while about the matter. “In passing under this tree the animal must have scraped his back pretty hard. Here’s a wad of dun-colored hair clinging to this branch. That proves it to be a moose, Tubby.”
“What if the old rascal should take a sudden notion to make another savage attack on our camp?” suggested Andy. “Hadn’t we better get ready to give him a warm reception, Rob? The law is up on moose and deer now, I believe. I’d like to drop that old sinner in his tracks. I’m going to get my gun.”
“No harm in being ready, Andy, though there’s small chance of his returning,” Rob replied. He, too, crept over to where his rifle lay, and secured the weapon. “His fury expended itself in that mad rush, I reckon. He would never dare attack us while the fire is jumping up.”
Nevertheless, the trio sat there for some time on guard. Andy, with the plea for neutrality still before his mind, and recent events down along the Mexican border, as read in the daily papers, occurring to him, called it “watchful waiting.”
“But what are we going to do for a shelter?” bleated Tubby finally, as if once more finding the temptation to sleep overpowering him.
“Oh, we’ll have to do without, and make the fire take the place of a brush covering,” remarked Andy superciliously, as became an old and hardened hunter. “Why, many times I’ve wrapped myself in a blanket, and with my feet to the blaze slept like a rock! I wonder what time it is now?”
While Andy was feeling around for his nickel watch, Rob shot a quick look overhead, to note the position of certain of the planets, which would give him the points he wanted to know.
“Close to three, I should say,” he hazarded, and presently Andy, on consulting his dollar timepiece, uttered an exclamation of wonder.
“Why, Rob, you’re a regular wizard!” he broke out with. “It’s that hour exactly. If you had eyes that could see into my pocket like the wonderful Roentgen rays, you couldn’t have hit it closer. I guess you know every star up there, and just where they ought to be at certain times.”
“It’s easy enough to get the time whenever you can see certain stars,” explained the scout leader modestly, “though you wouldn’t hit it so exactly very often as I did then. But as there are some three and a half hours before dawn comes we might as well soak in a little more of that good sleep.”
He showed Tubby how to arrange his blanket, and even tucked him in carefully, with his head away from the fire.
“You’re a mighty good fellow, Rob,” muttered Tubby sleepily, and they heard no more from him until hours had expired and morning was at hand.
There was no further alarm. The singular old bull moose must have wandered into other pastures after that mad break. They neither saw nor heard him again. It was just as well for the same Mr. Moose that he decided not to repeat his escapade, since he might not have gotten off so cleverly the next time, with those scouts on the alert, and their weapons handy for immediate service.
With the coming of morning the three boys awoke, and quickly prepared breakfast. Rob did not mean to go very far on that day. He believed that according to his chart and the verbal information he had received, they were in the immediate vicinity of the deserted logging camp near the border. He intended to circle around a bit, looking for signs that would lead them to it. All the while they could also keep on the alert for any rifle-shot that would indicate the presence of hunters in the neighborhood.
“There’s that railway whistle again,” remarked Andy, pausing while in the act of turning a flapjack, in the making of which he professed to be singularly adroit, so that he seldom lost a chance to mix up a mess for breakfast when the others would allow him.
“Guess the trains must have been passing all through the night, even if I didn’t hear any,” confessed Tubby frankly.
“Do you know, fellows,” asked Andy, since confession seemed to rule the hour, “the first thought that flashed through my head when we were so suddenly aroused in the night by all that row, was that the bridge had been dynamited by the German sympathizers, and the guards shot up sky-high with it. Of course, I quickly realized my mistake as soon as I glimpsed that pesky old moose lighting out, with the red embers of our fire scattered among all the dead leaves, and a dozen little blazes starting up like fun.”
“I wonder has any forest fire ever started in that same way?” ventured Tubby.
“If you mean through a crazy bull moose ramming through a bed of hot ashes,” Andy told him, “I don’t believe it ever did. For all we know no moose ever carried out such a queer prank before last night; even if such a thing happened, why the hunters would put the fire out, just as we did.”
“I guess Uncle George would have been tickled to see a big moose at close quarters like that,” said Tubby. “He’s shot one a year for a long while past. He stops at that, because he says they’re getting thinned out up here in Maine, and even over in Canada, too.”
Breakfast over, the boys loitered around for a while. None of them seemed particularly anxious to be on the move, Andy feeling indifferent, Rob because he knew they were not going far that day, and Tubby through an aversion to once more shouldering that heavy pack. In truth, the only gleam of light that came to Tubby he found in the fact that each day they were bound to diminish their supply of food, and thus the burden would grow constantly lighter.
Finally Rob said they had better be making a start.
“Understand, boys,” he told them, with a smile, “we needn’t try for a record to-day. The fact is, I have reason to believe that old deserted logging camp must be somewhere around this very spot. So, instead of striking away toward the west, we’ll put in our time searching for signs to lead us to it. At any minute we may run across something like a trail, or a grown-up tote-road, along which we can make our way until we strike the log buildings where Uncle George said he meant to make his first stop.”
“Oh! thank you for saying that, Rob,” Tubby burst out with, as his face radiated his happy state of mind. “For myself I wouldn’t mind if we just stuck it out here for a whole week, and let Uncle George find us. But then that wouldn’t be doing the right by my father, so we’ll have to keep on hunting.”
“I don’t mean to get much further away from the boundary,” continued Rob, “for what we saw yesterday bothers me. There’s certainly some desperate scheme brooding; that’s as plain as anything to me.”
“Just to think,” said Tubby, looking around him with a trace of timidity on his ruddy face and in his round eyes, “we may be close to a nest of terrible schemers who mean to do something frightfully wicked, and get poor old Uncle Sam in a hole with the Canadian authorities. Rob, supposing this job is pulled off, and those Canadians feel mighty bitter over the breach of neutrality, do you think they’d march right down to Washington and demand satisfaction? I heard you say they had raised a force of three hundred thousand and more drilled men, and that beats our regular army.”
“I guess there’s small chance of such a thing happening, Tubby,” laughed Andy. “You can let your poor timid soul rest easy. In the first place nearly all the three hundred thousand men have already been sent across the ocean to fight the Germans in the French war trenches, or else they are drilling in England. Then again our cousins across the border are far too sensible.”
“Don’t worry about that a minute,” he was told. “What we must keep in mind is that our patriotism may be called on to prevent these men from breaking our friendly relations with our neighbor, that have stood the test of time so well. If only we could find your Uncle George, Tubby, we’d put it up to him what ought to be done.”
“But even if we don’t run across him,” ventured Tubby bravely, “I guess we’re capable as scouts of taking such a job in hand of our own accord; yes, and carrying it through to a successful culmination.”
“Hear! hear!” said Andy, who liked to listen to Tubby when the latter showed signs of going into one of his periodical spasms of “spread-eagleism” as the thin scout was wont to call these flights of oratory.
So the morning passed away, and while they had not covered a great extent of territory by noon, at least the boys had kept up a persistent search for signs that would tell of the presence near by of the abandoned logging camp.
CHAPTER VI
THE LOGGING CAMP
It was along toward the middle of the day when Rob announced welcome news. He called a halt, and as the other pair stood at attention the scout master turned on Tubby with a look that thrilled the stout chum exceedingly.
“What is it, Rob?” he gasped, the perspiration streaming down his fat cheeks in little rivulets, for the day had grown a bit warm after that chilly night. “I know, you’ve run across signs at last?”
“Speak up, Rob, and give us a hint, please,” urged the hardly less impatient Andy.
“I wanted to see if you fellows were using your eyes, first,” explained Rob; “but Tubby seemed to be searching his inward soul for something he had lost; and, well, I imagine Andy here was figuring on what he wanted for his next meal, because neither one of you at this minute has thought it worth while to take a good look down at your feet. Right now you’re standing on the sign!”
They began to cast their eyes earthward. Andy almost immediately burst out with:
“Whee! an old long-disused tote-road, as the lumbermen call the track where the logs are dragged to the rivers, to be later on put behind a boom, and wait for the regular spring rise! Am I correct, Rob?”
“Straight as a die, Andy; this is a tote-road,” replied Rob.
“But what good is that going to do us, I’d like to know?” ventured Tubby, groping as usual for an explanation. “We don’t want to go to any river, that I know of. What we’re itching to find is the logging camp.”
“This track is going to bring us to it, sooner or later,” asserted Rob, with conviction in his tones. “I can give a pretty good guess which way the logs were taken along here, from the signs that are left on the trees and the bushes. Anybody with half a mind could tell that much. Very well, we must follow the track back, and keep watch for another road showing where the horses were daily taken to their sheds at the camp. I imagine it’s going to be a simple enough solution to the puzzle, boys.”
Andy was delighted. Tubby, having been convinced that the leader knew what he was talking about, managed to enthuse. Truth to tell, Tubby was yearning for the delightful minute to arrive when he might toss down that heavy pack of his for good and all, since they expected to go out of the pine woods much lighter than they came in.
They determined to sit down and eat a bite of lunch. After that they would again take up their task, the rainbow of promise glowing in the sky ahead of them.
“Have we gone a great distance away from the border, do you think, Rob?” Andy was asking, while they devoured such food as could be prepared quickly over a small fire.
“Well, that’s something I can’t exactly say yes or no to,” came the answer. “I don’t know where the dividing line comes. According to my reckoning we ought to be about as close as we were last night. In fact, I should say we are now exactly opposite the long bridge over on the Canadian side of the border.”
“But how could that be, Rob, when we’ve been doing considerable walking since breaking camp this morning?” demanded Tubby incredulously, but more as a means for increasing his stock of information than because he entertained the least doubt concerning the statement made.
“Our tramping hasn’t covered over half a mile in a direct line, because we went over a zigzag course,” replied the leader. “If you remember, whenever we heard a whistle for the bridge, it came from the west, showing that the structure lay farther that way.”
“Sure, you’re on the job when you say that, Rob!” exclaimed Andy, who had been an interested listener. “Only twenty minutes ago we all heard a rumbling sound, and decided it was made by a long freight train passing over the trestle leading to the bridge. It came from a point exactly opposite to us. You wouldn’t want any better proof than that, Tubby.”
So they chatted, and ate, and passed half an hour. Then Rob said it would be well if they once more went forth. That tote-road was an alluring object to Rob; he wanted to prove his theory a true one.
Once more they began to “meander,” as Tubby called it, through the woods, which had begun to thin out considerably, since most of the better trees had been cut down years back, and in places the ground was almost impassable with the wreckage of dead branches. Fortunately no fire had ever run through this region to complete the devastation begun by the axes of the lumbermen.
It could not have been more than half an hour later when Rob announced that he had discovered where the horses were in the habit of leaving the tote-road and following a well-defined trail through the brush and scant trees.
“Keep a lookout for the camp, fellows!” he told them, whereat Tubby began to elevate his head and sniff the air with vehemence.
“I thought I caught a whiff of pine-smoke,” he said, “but I must have been mistaken. Still, as the air is in our faces, it wouldn’t be strange if we did get our first indication of the presence of the lumber camp through our well developed sense of smell, rather than by reason of our eyesight.”
“Wrong again, Tubby,” chuckled Andy. “Eyes have it this time; there’s your camp ahead of us. Look over the top of that clump of brush, you’ll see the flat roof of a long log shanty, which must be the bunk-house of the lumber jacks in the days when they spent a winter here chopping.”
Even Tubby agreed with Andy after he had shaded his eyes with his hand and taken a square look. The thought that they were finally at the end of their search for Uncle George was very pleasing, and Tubby laughed as though a tremendous load had already been taken from his shoulders.
“Why, it wasn’t such a great task after all,” he remarked, as though he had never once dreamed of being despondent.
“Wait,” cautioned Rob. “Don’t count your chickens before they are hatched, Tubby. It’s poor policy to be too sanguine.”
“But Rob, didn’t you just say that was the camp?” pleaded the other.
“No doubt about it, Tubby. But possibly the person we’re wanting to interview may not be in the place,” reminded the scout master.
“What makes you say that, Rob?”
“Oh! I’ve got a sort of suspicion that way,” responded Rob. “In the first place we haven’t heard a single gunshot since arriving in the vicinity of this place yesterday, and that alone looks queer. Then we can see the roof of the bunk-house, with the mud and slat chimney in plain sight; it’s after the noon hour, too, and the chances are there’d be more or less cooking going on if the place were occupied, but so far as I can make out not the faintest trace of smoke is flowing from that homely chimney.”
Tubby, staring hard again, saw the truth of these assertions. He heaved a heavy sigh and shook his head dismally.
“Tough luck, I should call it, if Uncle George has never been here at all, and ours is going to be a regular wild-goose chase. Whichever way can we turn, Rob?”
“There you go jumping at conclusions, hand over fist, Tubby,” said Andy quickly. “Rob doesn’t mean that at all. Why, stop and think how your uncle was so very particular to mention that communications of importance sent to this camp would get to him in due time. He’s handling some big business, and couldn’t afford to drop out of the world entirely, even for two weeks. If he’s left here be sure we’ll find something to tell us where to look for him.”
“Come along and let’s see,” urged Tubby, “they say the proof of the pudding lies in the eating. Inside of five minutes or so we ought to know the worst, or the best. I’ll try and stand the shock, fellows.”
Once more they advanced. They could not always keep in a direct line on account of the obstacles that beset their course, so that Tubby’s estimate of the time required to reach the deserted logging camp proved erroneous; but by the end of ten minutes the little party drew up before the door of the long cabin which they understood had once sheltered a score of those rough wielders of the ax known as lumber jacks.
Some of the other rude buildings constituting the “camp” were in various stages of decay and in tumble-down ruin, but the bunk-house seemed to have been more substantially built, for it looked as though intact.
Before they arrived all of the boys had made a discovery that increased their haste to reach the door. There was some sort of paper fastened to it, and Rob had a pretty good idea as to what it would turn out to be.
“Uncle George has gone away from here, and left directions where to look for him,” announced Andy promptly, showing that he, too, had made a guess concerning the nature of that notice on the door.
“Shucks!” Tubby was heard to grunt, at the same time giving his burden an impatient flirt, as though almost in a humor to rebel against another long siege of packing it over miles and miles of dreary pineland.
But a surprise, and a pleasing one at that, awaited them all as they found themselves able to decipher the writing on the paper.
It proved to be a business sheet, with Uncle George’s printed address up in the left-hand corner. He himself had written the message in a bold hand, which any one capable of reading at all might easily make out; and this was what the trio of scouts read:
NOTICE
“We have gone over to the Tucker Pond to try again for the big moose that for two past seasons has managed to fool me. This year I hope to bag him. He is a rare giant in size. Make yourselves at home. The latch string is always out. We expect to be back in a few days at the most. The door is only barred on the outside. Enter, and wait, and make merry.
(Signed)
“George Luther Hopkins.”
When Tubby read that delightful news he fell to laughing until he shook like a bowlful of jelly. It evidently made him very happy, and he did not hesitate to show it to his two faithful comrades. Indeed, all of them had smiles on their faces, for it would be much more satisfactory to loaf around this spot, possibly taking toll of the partridges, and perhaps even a wandering deer, than to continue their search for an elusive party, whose movements might partake of the nature of a will-o’-the-wisp.
“I’m going to make a sign reading ‘Alabama,’ and stick it above the door, the first thing,” announced Tubby, with a grateful heart. “It means ‘here we rest.’ If ever three fellows deserved a spell of recuperation we certainly are those fellows.”
“How generous of Uncle George,” said Andy, “to say the latch string is always out! Then, too, he calls attention to the fact that the door is only held shut by a bar on the outside, instead of within. All we have to do, fellows, is to drop our packs here. I’ll remove that bar, and swing the door wide open, after which we’ll step in and take possession.”
He proceeded to follow out this nice little program, – at least he got as far as dropping his pack and removing the bar; but hardly had he started to open the door than Andy gave a sudden whoop, and slammed it shut again with astonishing celerity. Tubby and Rob stared at him as though they thought he had seen a genuine ghost.
