The Rival Campers: or, The Adventures of Henry Burns

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.

CHAPTER XII.

A CRUISE AROUND THE ISLAND

“Well, Bob,” said Tom, as they seated themselves on the bunks to collect their wits and think the situation over, “we know who did it, of course. The next thing is to prove it.”

“It won’t be so easy,” responded Bob. “Jack Harvey hasn’t done this thing without first planning out how he could dispose of the tent without attracting the slightest attention. He planned it in a good time, too, when half the village was away at the clambake.”

“Yes,” said Tom, “and that’s what he sailed out on that short trip for, to look in at our tent without exciting any suspicion. He found out that there wasn’t anybody around it, and then he and the others came down past our fire on purpose for us to see them and to prove by every one there that they were in another part of the island when our camp was stolen. He did it, though, and he’s covered it up well. We’ll have hard work to prove it against him.”

“I’ll be madder to-morrow, when I’m not so sleepy.” said Bob. “Let’s go on up to the Warren cottage now, and wait till to-morrow before doing anything. It isn’t going to rain to-night, and the stuff will not be harmed out here without a covering.”

So they travelled up to the Warren cottage, greatly to the surprise of the Warren boys, who had gone to bed and were sound asleep when they got there, and greatly to the concern of good Mrs. Warren, whose indignation did more to comfort them than anything else in the world could have. There was always room for more in the spacious old cottage, and they were soon stowed away in bed, quickly forgetting their troubles in sleep.

“You’ll stay right here for the rest of the summer,” said Mrs. Warren the next morning at breakfast. “You can bring your camp stuff up and store it in the shed, and I guess it will be safe there from Jack Harvey or anybody else. It’s a crying shame, but you’re welcome here, so don’t feel too bad about it. I don’t think the boys will be sorry to have you here.”

“I guess we won’t,” cried the Warren boys, in chorus. “But we’ll get that tent yet, I think,” said George Warren. “I don’t believe Jack Harvey would dare destroy it. He’s got it hidden somewhere, depend upon it. And we must find out where that place is.”

“I wish I could believe it,” said Tom, “but I’m afraid his experience with our box taught him a lesson. It is my belief that he has taken the tent and sunk it out in the bay, weighted with stones, so it will never come to light. However, we will start out after breakfast to see if any one in the village saw him or his crew anywhere near the tent while we were away.”

The search through the village for a clue proved, unfortunately, as fruitless as Tom had feared. Not a soul had seen Harvey or any one of his crew about the camp during the evening, nor, for that matter, anybody else. The disappearance remained as mysterious as though the wind had borne the tent away out to sea.

“Say the word,” said Captain Sam, when he heard of it, “and I’ll go over to Mayville and get warrants for the whole crew. We’ll have them up and examine every one of them. We can’t have things of that sort going on around this village.”

“I don’t want to do it,” said Tom. “At least, not yet awhile. I don’t like to suspect Harvey or any of his crew of actually stealing the tent. It may be they have taken it just to annoy us for a night or two, and we shall get it back again. I’d rather take it as a practical joke for a few days, at any rate, than to have any boy arrested. I can’t believe they would steal it for good, intending to keep it. Let’s wait and see.”

“You’ll never see your tent, then, I’m thinking,” said Captain Sam, “for I don’t believe Harvey has the least idea of bringing it back. And the longer we wait the harder it will be catching him. However, do as you think best. I’ll go down to-morrow and look their camp over, anyway, on my own hook. I have the right to do that. I’m a constable, and I’ll look their camp over on general principles.”

“You’ll not find anything, I fear,” said Tom.

“Fellows,” said George Warren, as they all sat around the open fire that evening, “we haven’t been on a cruise for a long time. What do you say to starting out in the Spray to-morrow for a trip around the island? It will take one, two, or three days, according to the wind, and Henry Burns says he can go. We’ll take along a fly-tent and some blankets, and part of us can sleep on shore, so we won’t be crowded.”

“Great!” cried Bob. “It comes in a good time for us, when we’re without a home – oh, I didn’t mean that,” he added, hastily, as Mrs. Warren looked reproachfully at him. “This is a better home than our camp was, to be sure. I mean, while our affairs are so upset, while we don’t know whether we shall be camping to-morrow or living here. It may help to straighten matters out, and, if by chance Harvey and his crew feel like putting the tent back, this will give them the opportunity.”

“Then we’ll get the lines ready,” said George. “There’s lots of small cod at the foot of the island, – and we might take a run across to the islands below, where there’s lots of bigger ones. We’ll plan to be gone two days or a week, just as it happens, and put in plenty of flour and biscuit and some canned stuff, in case we can’t get fish.”

“How happens it that Henry Burns can get off so easily?” asked Tom.

“Oh, they’ve let up on him a good deal since the capture of Craigie,” answered George. “Now that the papers have said so much about him and the rest of us, and the people at the hotel have made so much of him, Mrs. Carlin has come to the conclusion that he isn’t so much of a helpless child as she thought he was. She lets him do pretty much as he likes now, and so Colonel Witham don’t bother him, either. He will be over by and by, and we’ll make sure he can go.”

Henry Burns put in an appearance soon after, and the subject of the voyage was duly discussed in all its phases, and settled. The next forenoon found them all aboard the little yacht Spray, getting everything shipshape and storing away some provisions and water.

“Looks as though we were going on a long voyage,” said young Joe, as his eyes rested fondly on several cans of lunch-tongue and two large mince pies which Mrs. Warren had generously provided, besides several tins of beef and a small keg of water.

“Well, Joe,” said Arthur, “you know, having you with us to help eat up stuff is equivalent to going on a long voyage. And then, one never knows on a trip of this kind when he is going to get back.”

Which was certainly true, if anything ever was.

They made a great point aboard the Spray, these Warren boys, of having every rope and sail and cleat in perfect condition; no snarled ropes, no torn canvas, and no loose bolts nor cleats to give way in a strain; and they began now, as usual, to see that everything was in shipshape condition before they cast off from their moorings and headed out of the harbour.

The little yacht was, therefore, as trim as any craft could be when they set sail on their voyage, with Mrs. Warren waving good-bye to them from the front piazza.

“I never feel as free anywhere in the world as I do out aboard the Spray on a trip like this,” said George Warren, stretching himself out comfortably on the house of the cabin, while Arthur held the tiller. “It’s the best fun there is down here, after all.”

“Well, I don’t know, a canoe isn’t so bad,” said Bob. “You can’t take so many, to be sure, but when Tom and I get off on that and go down among the islands for a day or two, sleeping underneath it on the beaches at night and cooking on the shore as we go along, we feel pretty much like Crusoes ourselves, eh, Tom?”

“Indeed we do,” answered Tom. “It’s the next best thing, surely, to sailing a boat.”

“By the way, Tom,” asked Arthur, “where did you leave the canoe? Not where any one could get that, I hope.”

“No, that’s safe and snug,” replied Tom. “It’s locked up in your shed, and your mother has the key. That’s one thing we shall find all right when we get back.”

The wind was blowing lightly from the northwest, and, as they were starting out to make the circuit of the island by way of the northern end first, they had to beat their way up along the coast against a head wind.

“This little boat isn’t such a bad sailer,” said George Warren, admiringly, gazing aloft at a snug setting topsail. “For a boat of its size, I guess she goes to windward as well as any. There’s only one thing the matter with her. She’s small, and when she’s reefed down under three reefs, with the choppy seas we have in this bay, she don’t work well to windward, and that’s a fault that might be dangerous, if there were not so many harbours around this coast to run to in a storm.”

“I suppose some day we’ll have a bigger one, don’t you?” queried Joe.

“Yes, when we can earn it, father says,” replied George. “That don’t look so easy, though. A fellow can’t earn much when he’s studying.”

“What’s that up there on the ledges?” interrupted young Joe, pointing ahead to some long reefs that barely projected above the surface of the water.

“They are seals – can’t you see?” replied Arthur. “The wind is right, and we’ll sail close up on to them before they know it. We can’t shoot, because we haven’t any gun aboard, but we’ll just take them by surprise.”

The little Spray, running its nose quietly past the point of the first ledge and sailing through a channel sown with the rocks on either hand, came as a surprise to a colony of the sleek creatures, sunning themselves on the dry part of the ledges. They floundered clumsily off the rocks and splashed into the water, like a lot of schoolboys caught playing hookey, and only when the whole pack had slipped off into the sea did they utter a sound, a series of short, sharp barks, as here and there a curious head bobbed up for a moment, and then dived quickly below again.