Kitabı oku: «The Rival Campers: or, The Adventures of Henry Burns», sayfa 11
“And you say you knew that man was a burglar for two or three days, and let him stay in the house and didn’t tell us?” demanded Mrs. Carlin, wrathfully, of Henry Burns.
“Yes’m,” said Henry Burns.
“Well, if you’re not the worst boy I ever had the care of. Here we might all have been murdered and robbed, and you’d be as guilty as he. And to think I sat and talked with him there, and shook hands with him when he went away. Henry Burns, you’ll go to bed an hour earlier for a week for this. And you deserve worse punishment than that.”
Henry Burns assumed his most penitent expression.
CHAPTER XI.
AN UNPLEASANT DISCOVERY
Two weeks had passed by. Craigie and French were in jail awaiting trial, and the sensational arrest had run its course in the papers. Messages had sped here and there, and the police of many cities and towns were watching day and night for the missing Chambers. But watchers’ efforts were futile. If the sea had opened and swallowed him up, the man could not have disappeared more completely. Not one of the harbours along the coast sighted him, nor did he run to any for shelter. It had come on stormy the morning he sailed away, and something like a gale had set in the next night. So that there were some who believed it more than likely that the yacht Eagle had foundered, with only one man to handle her.
Be this as it may, yacht and man had utterly disappeared. Several times it was thought she was sighted by some pursuer, but it always turned out to be some other craft. Chambers had made good his escape. And he alone knew to what use he intended to put that freedom.
The bright August sun glared in through the canvas tent on a hot afternoon. It fell warm upon Tom, who, divested of his jersey and bared to the waist, stood in the centre of the tent, performing a series of movements with a pair of light wooden dumb-bells. A fine specimen of sturdy young manhood was Tom, lithe and quick in action. A skin clear and soft, bright eyes, muscles that knotted into relief when flexed and rounded into nice proportion when relaxed, quick, decisive movements, all told of athletics and an abstinence from pipes and tobacco.
“It’s your turn,” he said, presently, to Bob, after he had counted off several hundred numbers. Tossing his chum the dumb-bells, he slipped on his jersey again, and, reclining at ease on one of the bunks, watched Bob go through the same drill.
“Bob, I’m envious of you,” he said. “You are blacker by several shades than I am. I’ll have to take it out of you with the gloves.”
“It’s pretty hot,” said Bob, “but come on.”
“Heat doesn’t bother a man when he is in training,” said Tom. “It’s the flabby fellows that get sun-strokes. Sun does one good when he’s hardened to it.”
He fished out a pair of old boxing-gloves, that looked as though they had seen hard service, from the chest, and then he and Bob went at it, as though they had been the most bitter enemies, instead of the most inseparable of friends. They led and countered and pummelled each other till the perspiration poured down their faces and they had begun to breathe hard.
“Time!” cried Tom. “That’s enough for to-day. I think you had just a shade the better of it, old chap. Now let’s cool off in the canoe. You know what’s on the programme this afternoon.”
“I should say I did,” answered Bob; “and I’ll be hungry enough for it by the time things are ready.”
They carried their canoe down to the shore, and in a moment were paddling down the island toward the narrows. But they were not destined to go alone. Turning a point of ledge some little distance below Harvey’s camp, they came all at once upon Arthur and Joe Warren, walking along the beach.
“Take us in there, Tom,” cried Joe.
“I can take one of you,” answered Tom, pointing the canoe inshore with a turn of his paddle.
Arthur caught the end of the canoe as it came up alongside a ledge on which the boys stood, and steadied the frail craft.
“Might as well let us both in,” he said. “The more the merrier.”
“The more the riskier, too,” said Tom; “but if you fellows will take the chance of a ducking, I’m willing. Water won’t spoil anything I’ve got on. Climb in easy, now, and sit cross-legged, so if we tip over you’ll slide out head-first, clear of the thwarts.”
The canoe was brought to within nearly an inch of the water’s edge by the addition of the two to its burden. Tom gave a strong push with his paddle, and the heavily laden craft glided away from the shore.
There was an extra paddle, which Arthur wielded after a fashion, and it did not take long to come within sight of the narrows. There upon the shore were gathered some fifty or sixty persons. Over against a ledge a fire of driftwood blazed. When they had gotten in nearer they could see a smaller fire at a little distance from the other. Over this was hung a monster iron kettle, and bending over it and superintending the cooking of its contents was a familiar figure. It was Colonel Witham, and he was making one of his famous chowders.
At the same time that the occupants of the canoe discerned the colonel, he in turn espied them, and also noted a circumstance which they did not. A half-mile or more distant from them a big, ocean-going tugboat was passing down the bay, without a tow and under full steam.
“There come those mischief-makers,” said the colonel, muttering to himself. “I’m blessed if the canoe isn’t filled with them. If there’s an inch of that canoe out of water, there’s no more.” Then, as he noted the tug steaming past, an idea came to him that made him chuckle.
“Kicks up a big sea, that craft does, – as much as a steamboat,” he said. “Perhaps they’ll see it and perhaps not. If they don’t just let one of those waves catch them unawares. There’ll be a spill.” The colonel, chuckling with great satisfaction, went on stirring the chowder.
The possibility of a wave from a chance steamer had, indeed, not been thought of by Tom or any of the others. The water was motionless all about them, but rolling in rapidly toward them were a series of waves big enough to cause trouble, if they did but know it.
The colonel watched the unequal race between the waves and the heavily-laden canoe with interest. He looked out at them every other minute from the corner of his eye. He was afraid lest others on shore should see their danger and warn them.
“Let them spill over,” he said. “They can all swim like fish, and a ducking will do them good.” So he stirred vigorously, watching them all the while.
“That stuff won’t need any pepper if he cooks it,” remarked young Joe, looking ahead at the colonel.
“Lucky for us it’s not his own private picnic,” said Tom, “or we shouldn’t get much of it. Even as it is, it sort of takes my appetite away to see him stirring that chowder.”
“I’ll risk your appetite – ” The words were hardly out of Arthur’s mouth when precisely what Colonel Witham had been hoping for came to pass. All at once Tom, seated in the stern, saw the water suddenly appear to drop down and away from the canoe. The canoe was for an instant drawn back, then lifted high on the ridge of a wave and thrown forward, with a sharp twist to one side. Tom gave one frantic sweep with his paddle, in an effort to swing the canoe straight before the wave, but it was too late. The canoe was overloaded, and as the weight of the four boys was thrown suddenly to one side the sensitive thing lost its equilibrium and capsized.
In a moment the four boys were struggling in the water. Thanks to Tom’s precaution, they all went out headforemost, and came to the surface clear of the canoe, blowing and sputtering. A cry went up from the shore, and for a moment Colonel Witham was seized with a sudden fear. What if any of them should be drowned, and he, to vent a petty spite, had given no warning? In his excitement he failed to notice that he had spilled some pepper into the ladle which he held in one hand.
Two rowboats were hastily started out from the beach, and, impelled by strong arms, surged toward the canoe.
Tom was prompt to act. He and Bob had had many a drill at this sort of thing. Each of the boys was a good swimmer, and soon they were all clinging to the canoe, which had completely overturned. The boys were in about the same positions as they had occupied in the canoe, Tom at one end, Bob at the other, and the other two clinging each to one side.
“Quick, boys, let’s right her before the boats get here,” cried Tom.
Under his directions the two Warren boys now took their positions both on the same side of the canoe, with himself and Bob at the ends. Then all four took long breaths, treaded water vigorously, and lifted. The canoe rose a little and rolled over sluggishly, two-thirds full of water.
While the others supported it, Tom bailed the canoe nearly dry with a bailing-dish, which he always kept tied to a thwart for just such an emergency. Then he climbed in over one end, and Bob followed over the other. The Warren boys clung to the gunwales until one of the boats from the shore picked them up. The paddles were recovered for Tom and Bob, and the three craft proceeded to shore.
There, stretching themselves out on the hot sands before the blaze, they waited for their clothing to dry on them. They were much liked by the boys and girls of the village, and were at once a part of a jolly group, each of which party had a separate detail to recount in the capsizing of the canoe as they had seen it.
All at once the picnickers were startled by a howl of rage from Colonel Witham. All eyes were turned upon him. He was executing the most extraordinary contortions and dance-steps that could be imagined. An Indian chief, excelling all his tribe at a war-dance, could not have outdone the grotesque movements of the colonel.
“What ails the man?” cried Captain Sam. “He must have gone clean crazy.” And he started for the colonel on the run.
But before he could reach him another accident happened. In his dancing about, the colonel trod most unexpectedly on a small log of wood, his heels flew out from under him, and down he came with a mighty splash in a little pool of sea-water that had been left in a hollow of rock by the last receding tide.
There the colonel lay, like an enormous turtle, helpless for a moment with rage and astonishment, and all the while sputtering fiercely and crying out.
“What on earth ails you, colonel?” asked Captain Sam, hurrying to his assistance. “You haven’t gone crazy, have you?” And he helped the colonel to his feet with a great effort.
“Pepper!” roared the purple-faced colonel. “Pepper!”
“Pepper!” cried Captain Sam. “What about pepper?”
“Everything about it!” sputtered the colonel. “It’s in the chowder! Taste it and see.”
“What’s that?” cried Captain Sam. “If those young scamps have peppered the chowder I’ll thrash every one of them myself. Here, let me see,” and, picking up the ladle which the colonel had dropped, he cautiously tasted the chowder.
“Why, there’s no pepper in it,” he said. “It’s just right. I don’t taste any pepper.”
As, indeed, he did not, the colonel having got it all.
“You must have a strong imagination, colonel,” he said.
“Imagination!” bellowed the colonel. “Imagination! I just wish your tongue was stuck full of a million red-hot needles and your mouth was filled with hornets, that’s all I wish. Where’s the boy that put that pepper into that spoon? Where is he? Show him to me and I’ll make an example of him right here. I’ll put him head first into the chowder by the heels.”
As no one had put the pepper into the ladle, no culprit could be found to show to the colonel; and as the colonel could not select a victim out of a score or more of boys who were present, he could only vent his rage to no purpose, while the villagers, who had laughed themselves nearly sick over the colonel’s antics, gave him what sympathy they could feign.
It ended in the colonel’s taking himself off in a great fury, declaring that any one who pleased could make the chowder, and he hoped it would choke them all, and that fish-bones innumerable would stick in the throats of whoever ate it.
The colonel’s departure, however, far from putting any damper on the occasion, seemed rather to afford the party a relief; and his mishap made no small part of their amusement, as they went on with the preparations for the feasting.
Captain Sam, who could turn his hand to anything, took the position left vacant by the colonel, and declared he could bring the chowder to completion in a way vastly superior to the colonel’s. And indeed it was a decided improvement in the appearance of things to see the good-natured captain standing over the steaming kettle and cracking jokes with every pretty girl that went by.
The preparations for the clambake went merrily on. A huge pile of driftwood was brought up from the shore and heaped on the fire by the ledge. There were pieces of the spars of vessels, great junks of shapeless timber that had once been ship-knees and pieces of keels, timbers that had drifted down from the mills away up the river, now thrown up on shore after miles and miles of aimless tossings, and crates and boxes that had gone adrift from passing steamers and come in with weeks of tides. The flames consumed them all with a fine roaring and crackling, and, dying down at length after an hour or two, left at a white heat beneath the ashes a bed of large flat rocks that had been carefully arranged.
Several of the boys, with brooms made of tree branches, swept the hot stones clean of ashes; clean as an oven they made it. Then they brought barrels of clams, big fat fellows, with the blue yet unfaded from their shells, and poured them out on the hot stones, whence there arose a tremendous steaming and sizzling.
Quickly they pitched damp seaweed over the clams, from a stack heaped near, covering them completely to the depth of nearly a foot. Then on this, wherever they saw the steam escaping, they shovelled the clean coarse gravel of the beach, so that the great broad seaweed oven was nearly air-tight.
Then they heaped the hot ashes in a mound and buried therein potatoes and corn with the thick green husks left on it.
The women, meantime, had not been idle, for in a grove that skirted the beach they had spread table-cloths on the long tables that always stood there, winter and summer, fastened into the ground with stakes driven firm. If all that great steaming bed of clams and the chowder in the mammoth kettle had suddenly vanished or burned up, or had some other catastrophe destroyed it, there would still have been left a feast for an army in what was spread on the snowy tables from no end of fat-looking baskets.
There were roast chickens and ducks, sliced cold meats, and country sausages. There were pies enough to make a boy’s head swim, – apple, mince, pumpkin, squash, berry, custard, and lemon, – in and out of season; chocolate cakes and raisin cakes and cakes of all sizes and forms. There were preserves and pickles and a dozen and one other messes from country cupboards, for the good housewives of Grand Island were generous souls, and used to providing for a hearty lot of seafaring husbands and sons and brothers, and, moreover, this picnic at the Narrows was a yearly event, for which they made preparation long ahead, and looked forward to almost as much as they did to Christmas and New Year.
Never were tables more temptingly spread, and when, late in the afternoon, the benches around these tables were filled with expectant and hungry picnickers, it was a sight worth going miles to see.
Captain Sam pronounced the chowder done, and the great kettle, hung from a stout pole, was borne in triumph by him and Arthur Warren to the grove near the tables. Somebody else pronounced the clams done, and the gravel was carefully scraped off from the seaweed, and the seaweed lifted from the clams, and the great stone oven with its steaming contents laid bare. The very fragrance from it was a tonic.
Bowls of the chowder and big plates of the clams were carried to the tables. There were dishes of the hot corn piled high; potatoes that came to table black as coals, and which, being opened, revealed themselves white as newly popped corn. There was a mingled odour of foods, piping hot, and over all the grateful aroma from half a dozen coffee-pots.
“Cracky! do they expect us to eat all this?” exclaimed young Joe, as he surveyed the prospect. “I wonder where it is best to begin – and what to leave out.”
“Don’t try to eat it all, Joe,” said Arthur. “Give somebody else a chance, too. You know the night you went to Henry Burns’s party you ate so many nuts and raisins you woke up dreaming that somebody was trying to tie you into a square knot, and when you got fully awake you wished somebody would, and I had to get up and pour Jamaica ginger into you. Don’t try to eat more than enough for three ordinary persons this time, Joe, and you’ll be all right.”
Young Joe tried to smile, with a slice of chicken in one hand and a spoonful of preserves in the other, and a mouthful of both. His reputation at the table had been made long before that day, and had gone abroad, and here was the opportunity of a lifetime, for every good-hearted motherly-looking housewife within reaching distance was passing him food.
“I hope there’s a seat for me,” said Henry Burns, who came hurrying up. He and George Warren had made the run down the island on bicycles.
“Come on, both of you,” cried the crowd. “There’s always room for you,” and made places for them at once.
“It seems too bad not to invite those other campers up on the shore,” said one of the women. “I’m sure they haven’t had anything as good as this for all summer.”
“What! Harvey’s crew?” queried a chorus of voices, in astonishment. “Well, you don’t live near enough to where they are camping to be bothered by them. If you did, you wouldn’t want them.”
“We don’t mind some kind of jokes so much,” continued one of the villagers, at which Tom and Bob and Henry Burns and the Warren boys tried to look unconscious, “but when it comes to taking things that don’t belong to them and continually creating a disturbance, we think it is going a little too far. Perhaps it might do them good to get them over here and repay them with kindness, but some of us are not just in the mood for trying it.”
“Besides,” said another, “it’s too late now, if we wanted to, for I saw them starting out about half an hour ago in their yacht, and wondered where they could be trying to go, with wind enough to barely stir them. Some mischief, like as not, they’re up to. No good errand, I’ll be bound.”
Which was quite true.
However, in most surprising contradiction to the speaker’s assertion, there suddenly appeared along the shore Harvey and all his crew, walking close to the water’s edge, but plainly to be seen.
“Well, those boys must have changed their minds quickly,” said the man who had spoken before. “It is not more than half an hour, surely, since I saw them all starting out in the yacht. I guess they found there was not enough wind.”
Perhaps, however, there had been wind enough for the purpose of Harvey and his crew. There was enough, at all events, to carry them up past the village and back again to their mooring-place. If they had had any object in doing that, there had been wind enough to satisfy them. They seemed, moreover, in high spirits when they returned from this brief voyage, and laughed heartily as they made the yacht snug for the night.
Now they went whistling past the picnic party, all of them in line, and went down along the shore till they were lost to view in the woods.
“Hope they’re not going down my way,” said some one. “They’re up to altogether too much mischief around here; that is, I know well enough it’s them, but I can’t ever succeed in catching them at it. I’d make it hot for them if I could.”
But Harvey and his crew had surely no designs on the property of any one down the island, for they had not gone far in the grove of woods before Harvey called a halt, and they all sat down and waited. It was rapidly growing dusk, and they waited until it had grown quite dark. Then they arose, cut across through the grove toward the Narrows again, but keeping out of sight all the while, both of chance villagers who might be passing along the road, and of the crowd about the picnic fire.
When they had come to the Narrows, Harvey again called a halt, and stole ahead to see if the coast was clear. The island was a narrow strip of land here, with the bay on either hand coming in close to the roadway, but by keeping close to the water’s edge, and dodging behind some low cedars, provided the campers were all about the fire, they might pass unobserved. This they managed successfully, for, the driftwood fire having been renewed, the picnic party were seated about it, singing and telling stories.
Harvey and his crew went on up through the woods to their own camp, where two of them remained, while Harvey and George Baker and Allan Harding took their yacht’s tender and rowed rapidly on up toward the town. After they had started, Joe Hinman and Tim Reardon stole down through the woods again, and kept watch for a long time on the group about the fire. They did not return to their camp till the sound of a horn, some hour and a half later, signified to them that Harvey and the others had returned from their mission, whatever it was.
The driftwood fire began to blaze low as the evening wore on, and by nine o’clock the greater number of the picnickers had said “Good night” and started on their journey home. Some of them had come from away down at the foot of the island, and still others from the little settlement at the head. These now harnessed in their horses, which had been allowed to feed near the grove, and drove away, their flimsy old wagons rattling along the road like so many wrecks of vehicles.
Around the fire, however, there still lingered a group of fishermen and village folk, telling stories and gossiping over their pipes.
“I wonder whatever became of that fellow Chambers,” said one. “He was the slickest one of the lot, so that Detective Burton said. Do you recall how he sailed away that morning, as cool as you please, with the pistols popping all around his head?”
The subject had never ceased to be the one great topic of interest in the village of Southport.
“I reckon he’ll never be seen around these parts again,” remarked another. “Like as not he’s up in Long Island Sound long before this. Or maybe the yacht’s hauled up somewhere, and he’s got clear out of the country. There’s no telling where those fellows will travel to, if they’re put to it, according to what I read in the papers.”
“It’s mighty mysterious,” said Captain Sam. “For my part, I think it’s queer nobody’s sighted him somewhere along the coast. A man don’t sail for days without somebody seeing him. He ought to be heard from along Portland way, that is, if he ever left this bay, which I ain’t so sure of, after all.”
This remark seemed to amuse most of the group.
“Seems as though you expected you might see him and that crack yacht some night sailing around here like the Flying Dutchman,” said one, at which the others took their pipes out and chuckled. “You’ll have to get out your old Nancy Jane and go scouring the bay after him, Cap’n Sam. If he ever saw her coming after him, he’d haul down his sail pretty quick and invite you to come aboard.”
“Well,” replied Captain Sam, good-naturedly, “there’s no accounting for the strange things of the sea, as you ought to know, Bill Lewis, with the deep-water voyages you’ve been on. Still, I’m free to say I don’t see how that ’ere craft can have got out of here and gone clear up Boston way or New York, without so much as a sail being sighted by all them as has been watching for her. I don’t try to explain where he may be, but I stick to my idea that there’s something mighty queer about it.”
“He may be at the bottom of this ’ere bay,” said the man addressed as Bill Lewis. “Stranger things than that have happened, and he was but one man in a big boat on a coast he couldn’t have known but little of. There’s many a reef for him to hit in the night, and the day he escaped was stormy. For that matter, I give it up, too. He was a slick one, that’s all I can say.”
And so they rolled this strange and mysterious bit of gossip over, while the fire burned to coals and the coals died away to ashes.
“Tom,” said Bob, as they launched the canoe from the shelving beach some time after ten o’clock, “it’s too glorious a night to go right home to bed. What do you say to a short paddle, just a mile or so out in the bay, to settle that terrible mixture of pie and clams that we’ve eaten? We’ll sleep all the sounder for it.”
“Perhaps ’twill save our lives,” replied Tom. “I ate more than I’ve eaten in the last week. Let’s take it easy, though. I don’t feel like hard work.”
So they paddled leisurely out for about a mile, enjoying the brilliant starlight and watching the dark waters of the bay flash into gleams of phosphoric fire at every stroke of the paddle. It was like an enchanted journey, gliding along through the still night, amid pools of sparkling gems.
It was nearing eleven when they drove the bow of their canoe in gently upon the sand at their landing-place and stepped out upon the shore.
“One, two, three – pick her up,” said Tom, as each grasped a thwart of the canoe, ready to swing it up on to their shoulders. Up it came, fairly on to the shoulders of Bob, who had the bow end, but Tom, who never fumbled at things, seemed somehow to have made a bad mess of it. His end of the canoe dropped clumsily to the ground, twisting Bob’s head uncomfortably and surprising that young gentleman decidedly.
“What’s the matter, Tom?” he asked, laughing good-naturedly, as he turned to his companion. But Tom for a moment answered never a word. He stood staring ahead like one in a dream. Bob, amazed, looked in the same direction.
“Bob,” whispered Tom, huskily, “do you see – it’s gone – it isn’t there. Do you see – the camp – the old tent – it’s gone, as sure as we’re standing here.”
They rushed forward to where the tent had been but a few hours before that afternoon, and stood there dismayed. There in the open air were their bunks, their camp-stools, their camp-kit, and the great chest; but the tent that had sheltered them had disappeared. Around about the spot were holes where the stakes that had held it had been hastily wrenched out, but not a scrap of canvas nor a piece of rope that had guyed it were to be seen. Only the poles that had been its frame lay upon the ground. Their tent had utterly vanished.
