The Rival Campers: or, The Adventures of Henry Burns

“I’ll shoot the first boy that steps a foot on this boat,” cried the man; but the words were scarce out of his mouth before they were upon him. He had been in danger before and knew how to make the most of his chances, and he stood, desperate but cool, as they made their rush.

There was a shot, and Jack Harvey, who was leading, gave a cry of pain, for a bullet just grazed his left shoulder. He stumbled and fell full at the feet of the man as another shot was fired and young Tim thought his right hand was gone.

The next moment Harvey had the man by the legs, while Allan Harding and George Baker and Joe made a rush for him. The man fell heavily, Joe Hinman clinging with both hands to one wrist, so that he could not fire again. They rolled over and over in the cockpit for a moment, the boys and he. Twice the man got to his knees and twice they dragged him down again; till, at length, young Tim, whose hand was not shot away, but only slightly wounded, managed to run in and deal the man a blow with the end of an oar, which stunned him for a moment, so that they got him flat and had bound the loose end of a halyard about him before he came fully to his senses. Then, as they proceeded to complete the job and tie him fast, hand and foot, he recognized Harvey for the first time.

“Hulloa!” he exclaimed. “Why, where have I seen you before? You’re not the chap in the pasture, are you?”

“The same,” said Harvey.

“Well, the game’s up,” said the man, coolly. “’Twas a mistake, and I knew it the moment after I had done it. I was a fool to hit you that night. It’s my temper, that’s what has beat me. It gets away from me sometimes. I dare say if I had gone along about my business you wouldn’t have followed me, eh?”

“Probably not,” answered Harvey. “That is why I am glad you knocked me down,” and then, taking a quick glance over the side of the boat, he cried:

“Joe! Allan! George! Out with the sweeps, lively! We’re going aground.”

Harvey sprang to the wheel, hauling in on the main-sheet as he did so.

But it was too late. There was a gentle shock that shook the sloop from end to end, a dull, grating sound, and the next moment the big sloop rested firmly on a jagged rock of the reach, listing as she hung, and wrenching the bilge so that she made water rapidly.

“Whew!” cried Harvey. “Here’s a mess. We’re wrecked, and badly, too. How in the world are we ever going to get out of this?”

It was, indeed, a serious problem. The Surprise, her bow planks ripped open by the collision, had sunk within a few minutes, and now lay on bottom, with her deck covered. The big sloop, hard aground and full of iron ballast, was not a thing to be moved easily.

“This is a scrape and no mistake,” said Harvey. “Here we are, where a boat may pick us up in a day or a week, but more likely not for a week. We’ve got our man, but the reefs have got us. Well, we have got to figure out some way to get out of it ourselves.”

But first they took account of their wounds, which had, now that the excitement was over, begun to sting and smart. They found that neither Harvey’s nor Tim’s wound was at all serious, mere surface flesh-wounds. The back of young Tim’s hand was bare of skin for the length of three inches across, and Harvey’s shoulder bled badly till it was cleansed and bandaged, but it was the price of victory, and they accounted it cheap. All of them had honourable scars of battle, bruises and scratches without number, and every one of them was proud of his, and wouldn’t have had one less for the world.

Taking their prisoner, securely bound, they all rowed ashore to survey their surroundings, build a fire and get breakfast, and make plans for getting away.

“There’s only one thing to be done,” said Harvey, after they had finished breakfast and sat by the shore, surveying the wrecks of the yachts. “The Surprise is done for. We can’t raise her. But the big sloop is not so badly hurt but what we can repair her, if we can only float her. The first thing we have got to do, when the tide goes out, is to get all that pig iron out of her, and that’s a day’s job, at the least. Then we may beach her at high tide and patch her up. It’s a big contract, though.”

That day they brought the spare sails of the sloop ashore and pitched a tent with them; and, when the tide was low enough for them to work, they began the hard labour of lightening the big sloop of its ballast.

They worked all that tide like beavers, and by night the yacht was light. They camped on shore that night, standing watch by turns over their prisoner.

The next day at low water they found the worst of the leaks in the sloop, and made shift to patch them up temporarily with strips of canvas tacked on and daubed with paint, which they found in the sloop’s locker, and by recaulking some of the seams with oakum. By the next high tide, with hard pumping, she was sufficiently lightened to float clear of the reef, though still leaking badly, and they got her around to a clear, steeply shelving strip of beach, where they rested her more easily when the tide fell, and so could work on the repairs to better advantage.

Another night in camp ashore, and the next day they floated the sloop off again at high tide and loaded about half of her ballast in again.

“That will keep her right side up till we can get back to Southport,” said Harvey. “I think we can make it, if we carry short sail, so as not to strain her and open up those places where we have patched her. We will try it, anyway, for I have half an idea that our running off so soon after the fire may have made talk about us, and the quicker we get back and put an end to that the better.”

So that afternoon they began their voyage home again, looking very serious as the mast of the yacht Surprise, sticking out of water, faded from their view, but swelling with pride and satisfaction as they peered in now and then at a form that lay secure on one of the cabin bunks.

They sailed all that night, for the breeze held fair and light, and by daybreak of the following morning they came into the harbour of Southport.

Harvey and Joe Hinman rowed ashore, soon after they came to their old moorings off the camp, to see how the land lay; but came back on the run in about twenty minutes, and made the water boil as they rowed out to the yacht.

“We’re off for Mayville,” cried Harvey. “We’ll put on more sail, too, if it pulls the bottom out of her. Why, what do you think! Who’s arrested for the fire?”

And he told the news, to the amazement of young Tim and George Baker and Allan Harding.

“I’ve got a score to pay to Tom Harris and Bob White,” he exclaimed.

“Why, they saved your life, Jack,” said young Tim.

“That’s what,” said Harvey. “I owe them one for that. Here’s a chance to get square, if we can only make it in time.”

“And only to think,” muttered the man in the cabin, as he looked out at the stalwart but boyish figure at the wheel, “that I had that young fellow in the same boat with me at night in the middle of Samoset Bay! Well, if I had only done as I set out to, then, I wouldn’t be here now, that’s all. But how is a man to look ahead so far?”

CHAPTER XXI.

THE TRIAL

What one man knew in Mayville was every man’s property. Gossip always spread through the town like wildfire. So it happened that on the morning of the arrival of the Nancy Jane and the Spray there was a buzzing and a shaking of heads and a wagging of tongues; and before long the whole town knew that something of vast importance was about to take place up at Squire Ellis’s court.

“It’s those young fellows that set the hotel afire over across at Southport,” said a certain tall, gaunt individual, who happened to be the centre of an excited group on one of the street corners, near the town pump. “I hear as how Squire Barker is going to defend them, but they do say he’s got no case, because I heard Lem Stevens say as he heard Squire Brackett declare he saw them young chaps down in the billiard-room of the hotel along about midnight, and the fire started pretty quick after that.”

“Well, guess they’ll catch it if Squire Brackett is on their trail,” volunteered another of the group. “He ain’t given to showing kindness to anybody, much less to a lot of firebugs.”

“I don’t believe they ever done it, anyway,” ventured a third. “They don’t seem like that kind, from all I can learn, and they do say as how they pitched in and saved a lot of Colonel Witham’s boarders from being burned in their beds, when the flames was a-spreadin’ fast.”

And so the gossip waged, this way and that, while impatient knots of idlers hung around the entrance to Squire Ellis’s court, waiting for ten o’clock, when proceedings should begin.

Shortly before the old town clock beat out the ten solemn strokes that proclaimed the formal sitting of justice, a whisper ran along the line of loiterers, “Here he comes. It’s the judge.” And that person of great importance, a short, thick-set man, with a quick, nervous step, an energetic, sharp manner, but, withal, a kindly eye, entered the court-room. The next moment the clock announced his punctuality.

The crowd swarmed into the court-room, stuffy and hot enough already, and the air vibrated with expectancy.

Proceeding up the long village street at this moment was a little group, headed by Captain Sam, not wholly unimpressed with the importance of his own part in the affair, the boys and Mrs. Warren following, and, not far in the rear, the colonel and the squire. Just as they reached the court-room door, Captain Sam halted the little party for a moment, and, not without reluctance, said: “Well, boys, I suppose I’ll have to serve these ’ere warrants before we go inside. I’m free to say I’m sorry to do it, but they’re the orders of this ’ere honourable court, and they must be obeyed by me, a sworn officer of the law.”

And having disposed of this somewhat painful formality, Captain Sam opened the door and the party were in court.

Presently they were joined by Squire Barker, a sober, elderly, clerical-looking lawyer, dressed in a somewhat rusty suit of black, serious-minded, whose lugubrious manner was not calculated to infuse a spirit of cheer into hearts that were sinking.

The county attorney, who was to conduct the case for the people of the State, a youthful attorney, of comparatively recent admission to practice, bustled about as became a functionary with the burden of an important matter upon his shoulders.

The court-room, save for the buzzing of innumerable flies upon the uncleaned window-panes, was still as a church when His Honour announced that the court was now open for whatsoever matters the county attorney had to bring before it.

After the usual formality of acquainting His Honour officially of the matter in hand, which matter His Honour was already as much acquainted with as a thousand and one busy tongues of gossip could make him, the likewise formal answer of “Not guilty” was returned, and, without further delay, Colonel Witham was called to the stand.

The colonel, fully awake to his opportunity, took the stand rather pompously, thrust a well-filled, expansive waistband to the front, whence there dangled from a waistcoat pocket a ponderous gold chain, plentifully adorned with trinkets, in the handling of which, as he testified, a large seal ring on a finger of his right hand was ostentatiously displayed.

Yes, – in answer to questions, – he was the lessee of the Bayview Hotel on the 10th of September last, on which day it was burned to the ground; and, if he did say it, there was no better conducted hotel along the shores of Samoset Bay.

Suggestion by His Honour that he please answer the questions as put, and reserve his own personal opinions and convictions to himself, received by the colonel with evident surprise and some little loss of dignity.

Then the colonel detailed, so far as he knew them, the events of the night of the fire; how he was first aroused by the cry of “Fire!” and how the first persons he encountered – within his very hotel, in fact – were the accused; how the smoke was even then pouring up from the basement windows, and that upon investigation he had found the whole basement floor to be on fire, so that it was already far beyond control.

Then there followed a detailed account of the fire, of the destruction of this section and that, and, finally, the utter collapse and ruin of the entire structure, with all that it had contained. The colonel did the scene full justice in his description, making an unmistakable impression on the minds of the assembled townsfolk.

Asked if he had seen any suspicious characters in or about the hotel on the day or night of the fire, the colonel said he had not; nor had any stranger who had not been subsequently accounted for come ashore from the steamers on that day.

Leaving at length the subject of the fire, County Attorney Perkins came down to the subject of the attempt to serve the warrants upon the boys at the camp and at the Warren cottage, the failure, the subsequent pursuit of the boys down the bay in the Nancy Jane, and the final surrender of the yacht Spray in the middle of the bay.

It was clear that this part of the evidence would have great weight with the court. After the attorney’s questions he put several of his own, regarding the escape from Little Reach, and whether it must have been clear to the boys in the yacht that they were being pursued.

It was this testimony that made Mr. Warren breathe hardest, and put his hand to his head with a troubled look.

Squire Barker’s cross-examination was brief, but he made two telling points, which might have their influence. One was, that the boys had been very brave on the night of the fire, and had undoubtedly saved many lives. This the colonel reluctantly had to admit. The other, and far more important point, was the bringing out that early on the morning of the fire the colonel had seen that the yacht Surprise was absent from her moorings, whereas the colonel had seen her lying there the afternoon preceding.

“Was it not common talk in the village that Harvey and his crew were missing the very morning after the fire?” inquired Squire Barker.

“It was,” answered the colonel.

“And did you not see all of the accused about the village for the entire day following the fire?”

“Yes.”

There was a buzz in the court-room, which indicated that this point had told.

“And is it not true,” continued Squire Barker, “that this Jack Harvey and his crew have not yet returned, are still missing?”

The colonel said he believed such was the case.

Asked why he had not secured their arrest, he responded that he felt sure he was on the right track, as he would prove by his witness, Squire Brackett.

And Squire Brackett, nothing loath, was the next witness. Having brought out, what everybody knew, that the squire was a property owner and a man of importance in his own village, the county attorney asked:

“And where were you shortly after midnight on the night of September 10th?”

“I was passing the Hotel Bayview on my way to the shore.”

“What did you see as you neared the hotel?”

“I saw a light in the billiard-room window, and went to the window and looked in.”

“Did you see any one in there?”

“I did.”

“And who were they?”

“These accused,” and the squire named in turn each of the six boys and pointed them out in court.

They, feeling the eyes of all turned toward them, the awful stillness of the court-room for the moment following the squire’s declaration, and oppressed more than ever by the hot, choking atmosphere of the stuffy little court, turned white and red by turns, wished that the floor would open beneath their feet and swallow them, and felt a burning sensation in their throats as though they were stifling.

“And how soon did you see flames coming up from the location of the hotel?”

“I could not say exactly; it might have been half an hour. I was out in the bay in my sloop.”

“Had you seen any suspicious characters in the village on that day?”

“I had not.”

Then the squire also recounted the events of the pursuit of the yacht Spray, the escape through Little Reach, and the subsequent surrender of the boys.

From Squire Barker it was brought out, as in the testimony of the colonel, the fact that after Harvey and his crew in the yacht Surprise had suddenly set sail on the very morning of the fire, they had not been seen nor heard of since. This, the squire admitted, was common knowledge throughout the village.

Then there came to the stand Captain Sam, standing awkwardly, with a hard clutch on the rail in front of him, as if he were afraid of the court-house suddenly dipping and rolling on a breaker and spilling him overboard.

No, he had no objection to removing his tobacco in deference to the Court, and did so; but forgot that august presence before he had been testifying long, and took another and a bigger chew.

Did he know the accused?

Reckoned he did, with a haw-haw that shook the court-room.

Had he pursued them in his sloop the Nancy Jane, in an endeavour to serve the warrants?

He had, and they worked their boat like sailors, if he did say it.

“And were you assisted in your pursuit by Colonel Witham and Squire Brackett?”

“Assisted!” drawled Captain Sam, and grinning from ear to ear. “Well, I dunno how much assisting you’d be pleased to call it, being as they were sick as a boy that had eaten a peck of green apples, and was sprawling around in the bottom of the boat like a couple of halibut just catched.”

Which, being pronounced by Captain Sam with the utmost gravity, produced such a decided impression on the audience of fisher-people and sailor-folk, that there was a roar throughout the court-room, at which His Honour announced that any such further interruption would be followed by the clearing of the room.

The squire and the colonel turned red in the face and looked rather foolish, inwardly wishing that Captain Sam was at the bottom of the bay.

Captain Sam, under further questioning, told again the story of that afternoon’s sailing, mentioning casually that the colonel had requested to be set ashore when the Nancy Jane was out in the middle of the bay, which request, as Captain Sam explained, there being no land near by excepting that straight down under water, he was unable to grant.

Another titter through the court-room, the colonel and the squire blushing redder than ever.

It was embarrassing enough to Captain Sam to tell how he had put the Nancy Jane aground in Little Reach, for he knew there was scarce a man or boy within the sound of his voice who wouldn’t vow to himself that, if he had been in Captain Sam’s place, he would have known better. It was really mortifying.

Squire Barker made the most of this, not because it could help his clients, but because it served in its way to put one of the people’s witnesses in a ridiculous light, and because it gave him a chance to show how smart a cross-examiner he could be, thereby elevating himself in the eyes and admiration of his townsfolk.

“So you got aground where these young men took their boat through all right, did you?” queried Squire Barker.

“I got aground,” snapped Captain Sam, sharply.

“And these young men took their boat through safe and sound?”

“I don’t know,” roared Captain Sam. “I didn’t see them.”

“But you saw them just a few minutes before that, didn’t you?”

“Guess I did.”

“And when you got to the entrance they were nowhere in sight, and therefore must have sailed through; they couldn’t have dragged the Spray over the rocks?”

“Suppose not.”

The colonel and the squire were rather enjoying this, and had plucked up spirits enough to titter with the rest at the discomfiture of Captain Sam.

“Then you tried to imitate these young men and go through as they did, but you didn’t seem to know the channel, and so got aground?”

“Channel!” roared Captain Sam, bellowing out the word in a rage and shaking a fist at the squire. “Channel, did you say? Haven’t I told you there wasn’t enough channel there to wash a sheep in? Didn’t I tell these two thick-headed numskulls” – pointing to the colonel and the squire – “that we’d get aground if we went in there? And didn’t they snarl at me like two old women, and accuse me of letting them ’ere boys get away? Didn’t I know we’d get aground in there, and didn’t these two seasick old pussy-cats make me go ahead and do it?”

Captain Sam, beside himself with indignation, roared this out so his voice could be heard far out in the street. In vain the court rapped for order. The whole court-room was convulsed, and, finally, His Honour, overcome with the situation, leaned back in his chair and laughed too.

Only the colonel and the squire, the butt of all the merriment, looked alternately at the floor and the ceiling, and mopped their faces with handkerchiefs as red as their cheeks.

At length, when order was restored, Judge Ellis said: “Captain Sam, you are excused. You are in contempt of court. The case will proceed without testimony from you.”

At which Captain Sam, feeling that he had in a measure vindicated his name and reputation, got down from the stand in a somewhat better frame of mind.

There followed several of the hotel guests, who had been duly summonsed to tell what they knew of the early stages of the fire, and whether they had seen any suspicious characters about the hotel or the village on that day. They made it very clear, together with the testimony of some of the villagers, that there had been no strange person seen in the town either on that day or the preceding or the following day, all of which argued, of course, that, if the fire was set, it was set by some one in the town, who was more or less known to every one.

On the other hand, it was definitely established by Squire Barker that Harvey and his crew had set sail in the Surprise while the hotel was still blazing furiously, for there were two of the villagers who lived down the island several miles from the hotel who testified to seeing the Surprise beating down alongshore about daylight.

This was highly important, and yet the one essential thing was lacking, nor could it be supplied by any evidence at hand, that Harvey or any one of his crew had been seen about the hotel that night.

It was noon now, and time for recess. So His Honour announced an adjournment to half-past two that afternoon, and the crowd swarmed out-of-doors, leaving the flies in undisputed possession of the unclean windows.

It was hard for the boys to realize that at last they were under restraint; that they were not free to follow the crowd of villagers and their friends. The seriousness of the situation assumed an even more depressing aspect.

“Do you think he will hold them?” asked Mr. Warren, anxiously, of Squire Barker, as the little party, under the nominal charge of Captain Sam, sat in the anteroom of the court-house, trying to partake of a luncheon which had been provided, but for which nobody seemed to have any appetite.

“Well, I can’t say,” answered the squire, wisely. “But I’m a little afraid of it. I’m just a little afraid. You see, their getting into the hotel and being there just before the fire can’t be denied. And I suppose that His Honour will hold that it was really breaking and entering to get into the hotel in the night-time in the way they did. And then, even though it may have been accidental, the setting the fire, still, as it followed and grew out of their unlawful act, they can be held for setting the hotel on fire.”

This sentence, somewhat involved as it was, but delivered with sageness and an ominous shake of the head, set the boys to breathing hard, and more than one of them found himself swallowing a lump in his throat.

“But there isn’t the slightest evidence that we set the fire,” said young Joe.

“Yes,” answered the squire; “there’s what they call circumstantial evidence, and that is, the fact of your being in there just before it was discovered. It may not be enough to convict on, but the question that’s bothering now is, will it be enough to hold you over on, and I’m bound to say it does look just a little bad. However, we won’t give up. We’ll fight it out to the last.”

But just what there was to fight it out on, not one of them could for the life of him suggest.