CHAPTER VII
THE NIGHT CAMP
Mr. Bobbsey knew it was going to be hard work to get the spare tire on the car and start off again in the darkness to find Midvale. He walked down the road a short distance to where his wife and the children stood. Bert went with him.
“The best thing for us to do,” said Mr. Bobbsey, when he reached his wife’s side, “will be to stay here all night. It’s too risky going on now—the road is too bad, and I can’t see very well to change the tire. We’ll stay here!”
“Stay here?” repeated Mrs. Bobbsey.
“Bert and I can sleep in the auto,” went on her husband. “We have often done it.”
“But there isn’t room for all of us!”
“You and Flossie and Freddie can sleep in that cabin,” went on Mr. Bobbsey. “Itwill be a good shelter and it isn’t going to rain, so it won’t matter if the roof leaks, and it looks as if it might, the place is so old. We have some auto robes with us, and the night is going to be very warm.”
“Do you really mean I should stay in that lonely cabin with Flossie and Freddie and Nan?” asked Mrs. Bobbsey.
“Why not?” asked her husband. “We have camped out in worse places than that, and so have the children.”
“I like it!” declared Flossie. “Maybe there’s a kitten in the cabin.”
“I like it, too,” said Freddie, always quick to side with his twin sister. “We’ll pretend we’re Indians!”
“Let’s take a look at the place and see if it’s as bad as it appears,” suggested Mr. Bobbsey. “Of course if it is too terrible, we’ll try to get the spare tire on and move along.”
“Oh, I don’t want to give you too much trouble,” Mrs. Bobbsey was quick to say. “But at first glance that place looked sort of—well, lonesome. Perhaps it will be all right. Let’s go and look,” she concluded.
Once they were inside the cabin, it was notas bad as it appeared from the outside. True, it was lonesome. The cabin, made of logs, stood by itself in a weed-covered field and there were no other houses within sight.
There was nothing in the place save some broken boxes and some bunks, like low, broad shelves, built against the sides of the smaller of two rooms. There were only two rooms in the place, and no upstairs. In one of the rooms there was a fireplace.
“Would you be afraid to sleep here?” Mr. Bobbsey inquired of his wife. “We could cut some branches from the evergreen trees outside and spread them on the bunks. They would be a sort of spring and mattress together. Then with the auto robes you would have a pretty good bed.”
“Yes, I guess it would be all right,” assented his wife. “We’ll stay. It’s the only thing we can do,” she added, with a look at the gathering darkness outside. Indeed, night had now come and only that Mr. Bobbsey had brought a big electric flashlight in with him from the car they could have seen little in the lonely cabin.
“Well, then, come on, boys!” called theirfather to Bert and Freddie. “We’ll gather evergreen boughs and make the beds.”
“I’ll help,” offered Nan.
“So will I!” chimed in Flossie.
“No, you stay with Mother, dear,” suggested Mrs. Bobbsey. “You can help me make a fire. I’ll just build a little blaze on the hearth,” she told her husband. “It will give us light to see and make it more cheerful.”
“There’s another flashlight in the car,” he said.
“Better save that,” advised his wife. “A little blaze of pieces of the old boxes will do very nicely.”
When the blaze was crackling up the chimney, built of field stones, the inside of the lonely cabin was very cheerful. Mr. Bobbsey and Nan and the boys brought in armfuls of the sweet hemlock branches and piled them on the wooden bunks which contained not even a shred of a blanket.
“When are we going to eat?” asked Freddie, when this work had been done.
“Yes, I’m hungry,” added Flossie.
“We shall have supper—such as it is—right away,” answered Mrs. Bobbsey. “Luckily Dinah put us up a big basket of food.”
When a sort of bed had been arranged for Bert and his father in the auto, where they would have to lie curled up “like puppies,” as Freddie said, and when the robes had been brought in to spread under Mrs. Bobbsey and the children, who would sleep in the cabin bunks, then the basket of food was opened.
Not much had been taken out for the noon lunch, and plenty of sandwiches and other good things remained for the evening meal.
They sat on broken boxes about the blaze on the hearth and ate, becoming quite cheerful and gay in spite of having to camp out so unexpectedly.
“Do you think Mr. Watson will worry because we don’t get there to-night?” asked Nan of her mother, when the meal was over.
“No; for I didn’t say exactly when we would get to Cloverbank,” answered Mr. Bobbsey. “I told him when we would start and said we hoped to reach Cloverbank the same evening. But I did not say we would certainly do so.”
“It’s a good thing you didn’t,” remarked Mrs. Bobbsey. “We never expected to haveto do this. But I rather like it,” she went on, with a laugh.
“It’s lots of fun,” said Freddie.
Flossie said nothing, but from her manner it was easy to see that the little girl was tired and sleepy. Freddie, too, was “fighting the sandman,” as his father called it, and so, after making sure that his wife and the three twins would be as comfortable as possible, Mr. Bobbsey and Bert went out to the auto to pass the night.
Mrs. Bobbsey had one bunk to herself, Nan took Flossie in with her, and Freddie had the third bunk, thus using all there were in the cabin. At first the little boy wanted to stay with his father and Bert in the car, but his mother had said:
“But what shall we do without a man to look after us in the cabin?”
“Oh, I’ll stay with you!” Freddie had quickly replied. “You needn’t be afraid of anything when I’m here. I’ll get a big stick and keep it by my bunk, and if I hear a noise in the night I’ll get up and hit it!”
“Do you mean you’ll hit the noise?” asked Bert, with a laugh.
“I’ll hit the thing that makes the noise!” declared Freddie.
So the Bobbsey twins had made a night camp, and, once the first notion of loneliness was gone, it was not bad at all, Mrs. Bobbsey declared.
The small children were soon asleep, and Nan was not long in following them to Dreamland. Mrs. Bobbsey, however, could not so easily drop off to slumber, and Mr. Bobbsey did not find the auto as comfortable as he had hoped.
Bert, however, was a healthy boy. He had often camped out, and could curl up almost anywhere and go to sleep. So he, too, was soon slumbering peacefully.
Just what it was awakened Freddie the little fellow afterward said he did not know. But several hours after having gone to bed on the hemlock boughs something caused him to open his eyes with a start. At first he could not remember where he was, it was so different from awakening in his comfortable bed at home. But when he saw a faint glow of the fire on the cabin hearth, then he remembered.
“Oh, we’re camping out on the way toCloverbank,” whispered Freddie to himself. In the other bunks he could hear the gentle breathing of his mother and sisters. Then came again the noise that had startled the little boy into wakefulness.
It was a noise as if some one were moving something in the darkness—moving something there in the cabin. It was not Freddie’s mother nor Nan nor Flossie, for they were lying in their bunks. The little boy could see them by the faint glow of the embers.
Then came the rattle of wood, as if one of the broken boxes was being dragged over the floor.
“Oh, I guess it’s Daddy come in to put more wood on the fire,” thought Freddie, with a sigh of relief. “Is that you, Daddy?” he asked in a loud whisper.
There was no answer, but the noise ceased. And Freddie knew that if it had been his father preparing to put more wood on the fire, he would not have stopped because Freddie spoke.
“No, it can’t be Daddy!” thought the little fellow.
Then he heard the noise again, louder than before. A piece of box was being draggedacross the floor, and Freddie could hear the scraping of feet—feet like those of an animal.
Freddie was a small boy, but he knew enough to be sure it could be no large or dangerous animal like a bear or a wolf. No such animals were left in the woods so near towns and villages. But it wassomething, and what it was Freddie felt he must find out.
“I’ll throw my club on the fire,” he told himself. “That will blaze up and I can see what it is.”
True to his promise, the little boy had placed a piece of dry wood—part of a box—near his bunk when he went to bed. This stick was to “hit a noise,” as Bert laughingly said. Freddie now reached down, felt on the floor until he found this wood, and then he slipped off the bunk and started toward the glowing fireplace.
But he had not taken more than three steps when he stumbled over something and fell down with a crash which awakened his mother who cried:
“What is it? Who is there? What has happened?”