The Rival Campers: or, The Adventures of Henry Burns

“Well, what are we going to do?” cried Squire Brackett. “We’re losing valuable time here. That little boat eats fast into the wind, they say, and we have got to get started pretty quick if we expect to overhaul her between now and dark.

“Come! What do you say, Cap’n Sam? You know the boats in the harbour better than I do. Whose is the best one to go after them with?”

“Wa-al,” drawled Cap’n Sam, “if I do say it, I suppose the Nancy Jane is about as good as any in a long thrash to windward, – if she does belong to me. She’s big and she’s roomy, and there’s a comfortable cabin in her for you and the colonel – for I suppose you’ll want to go along.”

“Go along!” exclaimed Colonel Witham. “I should say we did – eh, squire? When these ’ere warrants are served I want to be there to see it done, and so does the squire, I reckon.”

“That’s what I do,” responded Squire Brackett. “We’ll go along with you, sure enough.”

“Then you want to be getting some grub aboard right away,” said Captain Sam, with a fine show of energy and haste, “while I break the news to my wife. She’ll put me up a bite to last a day or two. You can’t tell, you know, when you start off on one of these ’ere cruises, where you’ll end up nor how long you’ll be out, – so you want to come prepared to stay.”

And then, as the colonel and the squire hurried off down the road, he turned back for a moment to Mrs. Warren, who stood weeping, and said, with rough good-heartedness:

“Now, don’t you go to taking on, Mrs. Warren. There’s some mistake here. Depend upon it. I’ve known them youngsters ever since they was no bigger’n short lobsters, and I know they ain’t got nothing bad enough in ’em to go to setting a hotel afire.

“P’r’aps there might have been some little accident,” he added, more conservatively. “Accidents always is happening, you know, and we’re all of us liable to ’em. I’ve got to do my duty, Mrs. Warren, bein’ as I am a constable of this town, sworn to obey my orders as I get ’em, signed and sealed from the court; but I’m goin’ to stand by them boys, all the same.

“So you just go and get your husband down here, quick as ever you can, – and we’ll settle this ’ere difficulty pretty soon, I reckon.

“And see here,” he said, in conclusion, “if Mr. Warren gets here by to-morrow noon, that’ll be time enough. And that gives you a chance to take the boat up to-day if you hurry, and bring Mr. Warren back with you. I’ll sorter guarantee we don’t fetch up here again till to-morrow afternoon, so don’t you worry.” And with a sly twinkle in his gray eyes the captain took his leave, and rolled along lazily toward his home.

He was still eating a hearty breakfast when the colonel and the squire burst in upon him, hot with impatience. But the captain was provokingly deliberate, and finished a few more huge slices of bread and a biscuit or two, and two cups of coffee and a few of his wife’s doughnuts, before he would budge an inch.

“The boys can’t escape,” he said, by way of assurance to the impatient pair. “They can’t go across the Atlantic in a little sardine-box like that, if it has got a mast and a bowsprit and a cabin to it. We’re bound to fetch up with them quick enough. Have a cup of coffee, colonel! Squire, sit down and drink a cup of coffee! Mrs. Curtis knows how to make it, if anybody does.”

But the colonel and the squire refused impatiently, and by dint of nagging and voluble persuasion they got Captain Sam started, and the three went down to the shore.

The news had spread abroad by this time, – thanks to the colonel and the squire, – and quite a number of villagers and cottagers had gathered to see them off.

What they said was not complimentary to the worthy two, for the boys, in spite of their pranks, were universally liked, and the whole village had not done with praising them for their bravery at the fire.

“Why don’t you go and arrest Jack Harvey and his crew?” cried one of the villagers. “Looks mighty queer to have them clear out, every one of them, the morning of the blaze. Dan French, he saw them standing out by his point early that morning while the fire was blazing its hardest. Reckon that looks a sight queerer than it does to wait a whole day.”

“Well! Well! I guess they had a hand in it,” cried Colonel Witham, as he stepped into the yacht’s tender. “We’ll hunt them up, too, later on. They are all mixed up in it, I’ve no doubt. Wait till we get the boys we are after now, and we’ll make them confess the whole thing.”

It certainly did look suspicious, this flight from both camps and from the Warren cottage, just after the fire; and the villagers, however well disposed they might be in the boys’ favour, or however much inclined to show leniency, could not explain it away.

“They must have been up to some of their pranks,” they said to one another, “and somehow got the hotel on fire. Colonel Witham must be right, – and, besides, Squire Brackett says he’s got the proof. He must know something bad, or he would not be so certain.”

And to this conclusion, reluctant as they might be to come to it, there fitted, in startling corroboration, the coincidence of their being the first to discover the fire, – the first to give the alarm.

And the villagers sympathized all the more, for this conclusion, with Mrs. Warren, as she took the boat for home that morning, bravely keeping back her tears, and receiving courageously their kindly assurances, though her heart was breaking.

The Nancy Jane was a heavy fishing-boat, of the centreboard type, big and beamy and shallow of build, able to “carry sail” in the worst of weather, but not so marvellously fast as one might have been led to believe by the recommendation of her owner. However, it was quite true that she could overhaul the Spray– only give her time enough, and provided no accident should happen.

“She’s got a bit of water in her,” said Captain Sam. “So make yourselves comfortable, gentlemen, make yourselves comfortable, while I pump her out. She’ll sail faster and point up better with the water out of her, and we’ll all be more comfortable.”

And the colonel and the squire made themselves anything but comfortable, fretting and fuming at the delay.

The captain took it leisurely, however, yanked the pump for ten minutes or more, to the accompaniment of short puffs of his pipe, and then pronounced her dry as “Dry Ledge at low tide.”

The colonel and the squire were neither of them sailors; so they could only wait on Captain Sam’s pleasure. He finally made sail on the Nancy Jane, got up anchor, brought her “full and by,” and they began the long zigzag chase down the bay in the teeth of the wind.

The breeze freshened as they drew out of the shelter of the island shore, and down between the nearer islands Captain Sam could see the line of breeze show black upon the water.

“Looks like a right smart blow by afternoon,” he said.

Colonel Witham looked up apprehensively.

“It doesn’t get dangerous, does it?” he asked.

Captain Sam laughed dryly.

“Guess you’re not much on sailing, colonel, are you?” he asked, by way of reply. “Bless you! We don’t get a dangerous blow in the bay once in a summer. No, you need not worry about that. There’s no danger; but I wouldn’t wonder if we had a bit of a chop-sea when the wind freshens.”

The colonel looked more at ease.

“No,” he said, “I’m no sailor. I manage to make the voyage down the river to the island, but that is as much seagoing as I have ever wanted, and this will be my first real ocean experience.”

“Not what you’d hardly call an ocean experience, either,” said Captain Sam, grinning from ear to ear. “No,” and he said the words over to himself as though they afforded him no end of amusement, “a slat to windward from the point to Gull Island ain’t just what one would call an ocean experience, though it does shake a body up now and then in a blow.”

Dinner-hour came, and they had the Spray well in sight, some miles ahead and pitching hard.

“We’ll eat a snack,” said Captain Sam, who was never so happy and hearty as when he had his hand on the wheel of the Nancy Jane. “Colonel, have one of Mrs. Curtis’s fresh doughnuts, just fried this morning, make you feel like a schoolboy.”

But the colonel, pale of face, declined.

“I – I don’t seem to feel very hungry just this moment,” he stammered. “Late breakfast, you know. Er – by the way, is it going to blow much harder, do you think?”

“No great shakes,” responded the captain. “Guess there may be another capful or two of wind in them ’ere light clouds out yonder. It may freshen a bit, but that’s all right. That’s just what we want. The harder it blows the more the Spray will pitch and get knocked back. It’s the kind of a breeze that the Nancy Jane likes, plenty of wind and a rough sea. The wind is bound to go down by sunset. It’s the way these southerlies act.”

“By sundown!” groaned the colonel. “That’s hours yet, and I’m sure we’ll tip clear over if this boat leans much more.”

“Built to sail on her beam,” explained Captain Sam. But at this moment the Nancy Jane’s bow snipped off the whitecap of a roller somewhat larger than its predecessor, and the spray flew in, drenching the colonel from head to foot.

He yelled with terror. “We’re upsetting, sure!” he cried. “Let’s turn her about, Captain Sam, while there is time, and start again when it’s lighter.”

“Nonsense!” said Captain Sam, with a grin. “You’re a bit shaken up, but you’ll feel better by and by. Just go into the cabin and lie down a little while. That may make you feel better.”

Perhaps it had been so many years since Captain Sam had experienced the awful misery of seasickness that he did not realize that the worst thing the colonel could do was to go down into the dark, damp, musty-smelling cabin of the old fishing-sloop. Perhaps he really did think that the colonel would feel better for it. But whatever his motive was, it had a sudden and deadly effect on Colonel Witham. Indeed, he had scarcely stuck his head into the stuffy cabin, had certainly no more than gotten fully within, before he staggered out again, with an agonized expression on his face, and sank, limp and shivering, to a seat, with his head over the rail.

“Oh! Oh!” he groaned. “I think I’m going to die. I’m awfully sick; never felt so bad in all my life. Can’t you put me ashore, Captain Sam – anywhere, anywhere? I don’t care where, even if it is a deserted island. I’d wait there a week if I could only get on shore.” And the colonel groaned and shivered.

It was obvious there was no way of going ashore, however, as they were some miles distant from it. There was nothing for the unhappy colonel to do but to make the best – or the worst – of it.

“Cheer up, colonel,” said Captain Sam, pulling out the stub of a black clay pipe, lighting it, and puffing away enjoyably. “I’ve seen ’em just as sick as you are one hour, and chipper enough to eat raw pork and climb the mast the next. You will be feeling fine before long, – won’t he, squire?”

But as the squire evidently had his doubts in the matter, owing particularly to the fact that he was not too much at ease himself, his response was rather faint; and the captain was left to the entertainment of his own society. He enjoyed himself for the next hour or two with a sort of monologue, in which he proceeded to analyze audibly the relative chances of the little yacht ahead and the Nancy Jane.

“They are doing surprisingly well for a small craft in windward work,” he muttered. “They handle her well. Still, the Nancy Jane is eating up on them. I say about sundown we shall be able to run alongside – Hulloa! If they are not changing their course to run down the Little Reach! Thought they knew better than that. Why, it’s what they call a ‘blind alley’ in the cities. Well, I’m surprised. They know the bay pretty well, too; and, only to think, they go to running in to a thoroughfare which really is nothing more than a long cove. They’ll fetch up at the end of it in an hour or two, and there’s no way out.”

The captain’s voice almost seemed to express disappointment that the chase should end so tamely.

“Colonel,” he cried. “Squire. It will be all over in a few hours now. They’re running into a trap.”

But the colonel and the squire were beyond interest in the pursuit.

The yacht Spray had, indeed, started its sheets, and now, with the wind on its beam, was running off toward a group of small islands, or ledges, on a course nearly at right angles with that which it had been taking.

The boys had watched the Nancy Jane anxiously for the last few hours.

“They are steadily coming up on us,” George Warren had said. “Too bad we could not have got a few hours more start. We might have given them the slip then when night shut down.”

“But we are not sure that they are after us, are we?” asked young Joe.

“No, but it looks pretty certain,” replied his brother George. “There’s nothing particular to start the Nancy Jane down here, and she is Captain Sam’s boat and he is the town constable.”

“Then what had we better do?” queried Tom. “There is not much use running away, if we are sure to be caught inside of a few hours. We’d a sight better turn about and start back, as though we had finished our sail. That would look less like running away.”

It was noticeable that, having once set out to escape, they accepted the situation now fully, without more pretence.

“We have got to decide before long,” said Henry Burns. “The Nancy Jane is overhauling us fast.”

“George,” said Arthur Warren, “I know one chance, if you want to try it, and if you are willing to risk the Spray, – and I think it would save us.”

“What is it, Arthur?” asked George. “If it is any good, I’m for trying it. I can’t see as we have anything great to risk, with a twenty-five thousand dollar fire charged to us.”

“What is it, Arthur?” exclaimed the others, excitedly. It did not seem possible there could be any chance of escape open, but they jumped eagerly at anything that offered a faint hope.

“Well,” said Arthur, in his deliberate manner, “you know the small opening between Spring and Heron Islands at the foot of Little Reach? Nobody ever ran a sailboat through there because it’s choked up with ledges. But you remember when the mackerel struck in to the Reach there last August, we all went down in the Spray for a week’s fishing. Well, one day Joe and I took the tender and worked our way clear through between Spring and Heron Islands to the bay outside. Now the Spray, with the centreboard up, does not draw very much more water than the tender, and by dropping the sails and all poling through, I think we can work her in clear to the other side.”

“We’ll try it,” said George Warren. “It is the only chance we have, so we’ve really no choice.”

And he put the tiller up and threw the Spray off the wind, while Arthur and Joe started the sheets. It was this sudden manœuvre which had startled Captain Sam.

They soon passed the entrance to Little Reach, two barren ledges shelving down into the water, and were well down the Reach when Captain Sam and the Nancy Jane headed into it.

“There they go,” cried Captain Sam, “like an ostrich sticking its head into the sand. Well, what can you expect of boys, anyway? We’ll overhaul them faster than ever now, because this big mainsail draws two to their one this way of the wind, and the jibs aren’t doing anything to speak of, the wind varies so in here.”

It was smooth water inside Little Reach, and, as there was now scarcely any motion to the Nancy Jane as she skimmed along by the quiet shores, the colonel and the squire began to revive a little, sufficient at least to regain their interest in the pursuit.

They were about a mile and a half down the Reach, and the Spray, not quite half a mile ahead, was apparently at the end of her cruise.

“They are at the end now,” cried Captain Sam, whose blood was up when it came to a race between the Nancy Jane and another, though smaller, craft. “We’ve got ’em like mice in a box.”

“By George! look there, colonel – look, squire!” he exclaimed, excitedly. “They have given it up. There go the sails. It’s all over. They may scoot ashore, but the island on either side is nothing more than a rock. Well, I vow! But I didn’t think they would quit so tamely after a game race.”

“We’ll make ’em smart for what we have suffered to-day, eh, colonel?” growled the squire.

The colonel grunted assent. He was not yet sufficiently himself to be very aggressive.

“What on earth are they doing?” said Captain Sam, a few moments later. “Looks as though they were trying to hide away among the rocks, like a mink in a hole. They’ll have the Spray aground if they jam her in among those ledges.”

The Spray, however, slipped in among the rocks, and was shut out from the view of the pursuers.

“Let ’em hide,” said Captain Sam, contemptuously. “That is a boyish trick. We’ll be up with them now in fifteen minutes.”

But the Spray, hidden from view of Captain Sam and the colonel and the squire, was not running itself upon the rocks nor poking its nose, ostrich-like, among the ledges.

The instant the sails were dropped young Joe sprang out on the bowsprit and lay flat, holding a pole, with which he took soundings as the others pushed and poled with the sweeps of the yacht.

They ran the bow gently on to rocks a dozen times, but a warning yell from Joe stopped them, and they turned and twisted and wormed and worried their way in among the ledges, turning about where a larger craft would have had no room to turn, and slipping over reefs that just grazed the bottom of the little Spray, and which with two inches lower tide would have held them fast.

“It’s just the right depth of water,” said Arthur, exultantly. “Luck is with us this time, for certain. An hour later and we could not have done it. But we’re going through. There is only the bar ahead now. If we clear that we are free of everything.”

Just ahead, where two thin spits of sand ran off on either end of the two islands into shoal water, was a narrow, shallow passage, where the water was so clear that it looked scarcely more than a few inches in depth, as it rippled over the bar.

“All out!” cried Arthur, as the Spray grated gently on the bottom, “We will lighten her all we can,” and they sprang overboard into water scarcely above their knees.

“Now, Joe,” said Arthur, “you and Henry take the head-line out over the bows and go ahead and pull for all you are worth. George and I will get alongside and push, and keep her in the channel, and Tom and Bob can get aft and push. We have got to rush her over that shallow place, and we must not let her stop, for if she once hangs in the centre we cannot budge her. The Spray is not a ninety-footer, but she’s got enough pig iron in her for ballast to hold her high and dry if she once sticks.”

The boys seized hold quickly, and the Spray, lightened of her load, slid along, at first sluggishly, and then gathering speed, as the twelve strong, brown, boyish arms pulled and tugged and pushed.

“Jump her, now, boys! Jump her!” cried Arthur, as they neared the shoal. “We’re doing it. Don’t let her stop, now! Oh, she mustn’t stop! We’ve got to put her over or die.”

And the little Spray seemed to feel the thrill and joy of freedom throughout its timbers; for at the words it surged forward with a rush, as though it would take the bar at a flying leap. The white sands reached up from the bottom, and the whole bar seemed to be rising up to hold the boat prisoner, as the water shoaled. But the little Spray kept on.

It hung for one brief, breathless moment almost balanced on the middle of the bar, and the white sands thought they had it fast; but the next moment it slid gently from their grasp, gave a sort of spring as it felt itself slipping free, and the next moment rode easily in clear water, just over the bar.

The next instant six exultant boys, their faces blazing with excitement and exertion, had scrambled aboard, falling over one another in their eagerness to seize the halyards.

They hoisted the sails on the Spray again in a way that would have made Captain Sam himself sing their praises, and now, with evening coming on, there was just enough breeze left in among the rocks to waft them gently along out of the inlet.

They watched breathlessly, as they neared the entrance to the outer bay, for a glimpse of the Nancy Jane; but the Nancy Jane, good boat though she was, was just a moment too late. Scarcely had they turned the little bluff and were hidden behind it, on their way whither they might choose, when the Nancy Jane rounded to at the entrance to the channel.

“It’s all done,” Captain Sam had exclaimed, as he threw the wheel of the Nancy Jane over and came up into the wind, but when he looked to see the Spray, she was not there. Not so much as a scrap of a sail nor the merest fragment of a hull, absolutely nothing.

Captain Sam was so dumfounded he could only gasp and stare vacantly at the place where, by all rights, the Spray ought to be.

The colonel and the squire, who had no preconceived ideas about the passage between the islands, solved the problem at once; but not so the captain.

“They’ve gone through there, you idiot,” exclaimed the squire, growing red in the face. “Where else can they be? They can’t fly, can they?”

The captain groaned, as one whose pride had been cruelly smitten.

“To think,” he muttered, “that I’ve sailed these waters, man and boy, for forty years, only to be fooled by a parcel of schoolboys from the city. Why, every boy in Southport knows you can’t run a sailboat through between Heron and Spring Islands. There ain’t enough water there at high tide to drown a sheep.”

“Well, it seems they got through easy enough,” answered the colonel.

“That’s it! That’s it!” responded the captain, warmly. “They do say as how fools rush in where angels don’t durst to go, and sometimes the fools blunder through all right. And here’s these boys gone and done what I’d a sworn a million times couldn’t be done.”

“Yes, and we probably can get through, too, if we only go ahead and try, instead of lying here like jellyfish,” exclaimed the squire. “Cap’n Sam, seems as though you weren’t so dreadful anxious to catch up with them youngsters as you might be. P’r’aps you might have told Mrs. Warren back there a few things that might explain this ’ere delay.”

“Yes, and if them boys can go through there, I, for one, don’t see what’s to hinder us,” chimed in the colonel. “Cap’n Sam, I don’t see what we’re a-hanging back for.”

And so, his pride humbled, and too mortified to stand by his own better judgment, Captain Sam reluctantly yielded to their importunities, and pointed the nose of the Nancy Jane in toward the opening amid the rocks.

“It can’t be done,” he said, doggedly, “but if you say that I am not trying to do my duty as a sworn officer of the town, I’ll just show you. Only don’t blame me if we’re hung up here hard and fast for twelve hours.”

The Nancy Jane, like a horse that is being driven into danger that it somehow apprehends, seemed almost intelligent in its reluctance to enter the stretch of reef-strewn water. It bumped and scraped its way from one rock to another, balked at this ledge and that, and, finally, after an extra amount of pushing and pulling by the three men, jammed itself fast on a reef studded with barnacles and snail-shells, and refused to budge one way or another. In vain they tried to bulldoze and cajole, to push and to pull, to plead with and to denounce the obstinate Nancy Jane. Stolid and deaf alike to entreaty and expostulation, the boat squatted down upon the reef like an ugly fat duck, comfortably disposed for the night and refusing to be disturbed.

“I told you so!” roared the captain, now aroused to his rights as skipper, and finding himself thus exasperatingly vindicated as to the impassability of the channel. “We’re hung up fast for the night, for the next twelve hours, till next flood. Then, if Lem Cobb is living in his fishing-shack on Spring Island, and will lend us a hand and a few pieces of joist to pry with, mebbe we’ll get off, and mebbe we won’t.”