The two came up the path together, talking earnestly. At a certain point in the path they paused, and Craigie stepped aside and found the spade where he had hidden it in the brush. Then they went on toward the haunted house. The boys’ hearts beat fast and hard as the men passed close by where they lay hidden. Surely two men who would lie in wait in the old house for these two must possess good nerve and courage. For the boys’ part, they were glad to be outside.
“Listen,” whispered Henry Burns, softly; “the tall one is downright angry with our friend Kemble. He’s pitching into him for something.”
It was evident that Craigie’s newly arrived friend was in a bad humour. He spoke angrily, and no longer in a low tone, but gruff and loud enough to be heard some distance away.
“What a fool you must have been, Craigie,” they heard him say, “to hide the jewels away in this tumble-down old place, when you could have hidden them well enough on your own person. It’s all well enough to say they’re safer here, but such an act might have attracted attention.”
“It might,” whispered Henry Burns.
“And here we are,” continued the tall man, “fooling away our time in this outlandish hole, climbing ledges and stumbling through woods, when we ought to be out in the middle of the bay by this time, clear of this place. There was the wind, holding on through the night, just opportune for us, and all you needed to do was to step aboard, if you had been ready, and off we should have gone, without dropping a sail.”
“Well, well, French,” answered Craigie, impatiently, but trying to mollify his companion, “we’ve got time enough. Don’t worry about that. You would have blamed me bad enough if the jewels had been found on me. Supposing I had had to tell you they’d been stolen, what would you have done? Would you have believed it, or would you say I had stolen them from you myself?”
“Believe it!” cried the other. “Why, you know I wouldn’t believe it. I know you too well for that. What would I do? What would Ed Chambers do? I tell you what we would do. After that job,—after coming way down here for you,—why, man, we’d hunt you to the end of the earth, if you got away with those jewels, but we’d have you and the jewels, too.”
With this angry utterance, the tall man laid a heavy hand on the other’s shoulder.
“Nonsense, man,” returned the other, impatiently, shaking off his grasp. “What a way to talk about nothing. You’re in a precious bad humour, seems to me. You know right well I wouldn’t go back on you and Ed.”
“I know nothing of the sort,” snarled the other “I know you, I tell you. I know you left us when things got hot, and took the jewels that we risked our necks for. Don’t I know that we shouldn’t have seen or heard of you again till we had hunted for you—which we would have done—if that man Mason hadn’t got so close up on to you that you didn’t dare try to get out of here alone.”
“Well, have it so, have it so, then, since you are bound to quarrel,” said Craigie, sullenly; and the boys heard no more. The two men passed beyond hearing and entered the haunted house.
“I don’t intend to miss this,” whispered Henry Burns, for once thoroughly excited. “There’s going to be the worst kind of trouble when that big black-looking fellow finds the box gone. Burton’s going to let them dig for it—he told me so. Said he was curious to see what they would do.”
“Rather he would have that sort of fun than I,” said Bob. “It’s a good deal like watching a keg of powder blow up. I say we’d better stay right here, as Burton advised, till we hear from them. We might upset the whole thing.”
“I don’t mind saying I’m scared clear down to my boots,” said George, “but I’m going to see the thing through. I’ll go if you will, Henry.”
So the two left Bob in the woods, close by the path to the shore, and crept up on their hands and knees to that same cellar window through which they had before witnessed the hiding of the box.
By the light of a lantern placed on the cellar floor they saw the two men. Craigie had removed his coat, and was digging in the earth where he had hidden the box. He worked vigorously, throwing up spadefuls of the soil with quick, nervous jerks. His tall companion looked on with an expression of mingled anger and contempt on his face.
As the box failed to come to light after some minutes of hard work, the drops of perspiration stood out in great beads on Craigie’s face, and he redoubled his efforts with the spade.
“It’s down deeper than I thought I buried it,” he muttered, with a sort of nervous laugh.
“You’re a fool!” was all the other said.
“Have it so,” said Craigie, and resumed his work.
The man was troubled, although he scarcely dared admit it, even to himself. He had already dug far deeper than he had before, and yet no signs of the box. The spade trembled slightly in his hands. He widened the hole and dug furiously.
“Going to dig over the whole cellar, I suppose,” sneered the other, and clenched his fists nervously.
Craigie did not reply. Perhaps the truth was beginning to dawn on his mind, for he half-paused and cast a quick, anxious glance at his companion. His face was ghastly white in the dim lantern light. He continued his digging.
All at once he uttered a cry. The boys, staring in with faces close to the window-pane, saw the tall man leap forward and deal him a heavy blow.
“Do you think I am tricked by you?” he cried. “You know it isn’t there. You knew it all the time. But you don’t fool me. You don’t escape to enjoy it.”
Craigie reeled under the blow and staggered back against the wall. If the other had followed up his advantage instantly, the fight must have been his; but one moment was enough for his companion. Still grasping the spade, he struck out with it as the man French rushed upon him again, and the other, receiving the full force of the blow, fell to the floor.
“CRAIGIE REELED UNDER THE BLOW AND STAGGERED BACK AGAINST THE WALL”“CRAIGIE REELED UNDER THE BLOW AND STAGGERED BACK AGAINST THE WALL”
“CRAIGIE REELED UNDER THE BLOW AND STAGGERED BACK AGAINST THE WALL”
The next instant, without waiting to see whether his companion were dead or alive, Craigie shattered the lantern with a single blow and darted for the cellar stairs. At the same moment the detectives threw open the door and rushed out into the cellar. They were just too late. One man, indeed, lay unconscious at their feet, but the other had already reached the cellar stairs, and was at the outer door in a moment more.
Down in the woods, by the path to the landing, Bob saw a sight that sent the hot blood to his cheeks. He had heard shots from the cellar, fired by the detectives after the fleeing Craigie, and wondered what they meant. Now, to his dismay, he saw Craigie at full speed flying along the path toward him.
He scrambled to his feet, though his heart beat furiously, and he trembled so that for a moment he clung to a tree for support. Then he thought of Tom, and it gave him courage. Standing as he had stood often before on the football field at home, when, as right tackle, he had saved many a goal, he waited breathlessly. Then as Craigie dashed up, he sprang out, tackled him about the legs, and the two fell heavily to the ground.
He was half-stunned by the fall, but he had breath enough to cry for help, and clung like a drowning man to his antagonist. Well for him then that, in his flight, Craigie had dropped the weapon he carried. They rolled over and over for a moment, and then the man had Bob in his grasp.
“Let me go!” he cried, fiercely. “Let me go, I say!” Bob felt his strength going, as the powerful arms tightened about him.
All at once, however, the other’s grasp loosened. Craigie felt himself borne backward, as two boyish figures rushed out of the darkness and threw themselves upon him. Then a weapon gleamed at his head, and Miles Burton stood over him.
“Hold on,” cried Craigie. “You’ve got me this time, though you had to get a boy to do it for you.”
“It’s all the same to me,” replied Miles Burton, coolly. “We’ve got you, that’s the main thing. Here, Mason, here’s our man.”
Mason, running up, stooped over the prostrate form for a moment, there was the sharp snap of steel, and Craigie lay helpless with a pair of handcuffs fastened to his wrists.
“Where’s French?” he asked, sullenly.
“Where you left him,” said Mason. “It was a bad cut you gave him. He won’t run away. That’s certain.”
“Serve him right,” said the other.
“Hark! What’s that?” cried Miles Burton, as the sound of two pistol-shots came up from the water. “They seem to be having trouble down there, too. You wait here, Mason, and I’ll get down to the shore.”
He ran to the steps, followed by the three boys. Down the rickety stairs they scrambled, and quickly stood on the ledge of the little landing, looking off on to the water.
What they saw was the yachtEagle, not far from the bluff, under full mainsail, standing out of the cove. At some distance astern was the rowboat, in which were Arthur and Joe at the oars. The detective stood at the bow with a smoking revolver in his hand. Not far distant, across the cove, was the canoe containing the other detective and Tom. The detective also had just fired. Miles Burton and the boys could see no one aboard the sloop, but still it sailed steadily on its course. The canoe vainly tried to head it off, but the yacht, obedient to an unseen hand at the wheel, quickly came about and went off on the other tack, soon putting a hopeless distance between it and its pursuers.
They could not see the man aboard, for the reason that he lay flat in the cockpit, and, with one arm upraised, directed the course of the yacht.
“What a pity! What a pity!” said Miles Burton, talking softly to himself. “How could it have happened? I would rather have lost the other two than that man Chambers. He’s the most dangerous man of the three, and the man I wanted most.”
His face showed the keenest disappointment, but he had learned self-control in his business, and refrained from speaking above his ordinary tone of voice.
“How did it happen, Watkins?” he asked, as the rowboat came in to the landing for them.
“It’s all our fault, Burton,” said the other, bitterly. “Stapleton and I should have closed in the moment we heard the first shots; and we should have got aboard the yacht and waited. But I was not sure but what Chambers would land and go up the bluff to the rescue of his comrades, and so I waited to see what he would do. I might have known him better. These fellows are always looking out for number one, and that’s a safe rule to go by.
“All at once we saw him come out from the shadow of the bluff, rowing as hard as ever he could for the yacht. We were after him then, both Stapleton and I. And I’m certain of one thing. No one could have got us out to that yacht faster than these boys. They rowed like men. But, you see, he had but a few strokes of the oars to pull, compared with us. And he got to the yacht when we were still some rods away.
“I never dreamed but what we had him then, for his anchor was down. But what did he do but spring aboard, not stopping to see what became of his rowboat, rush forward as quick as a cat, whisk out a knife, and cut his hawser before you could say ‘Scat.’ Then he jumped aft mighty quick, grabbed the wheel as cool as anything you ever saw, and had her under headway in no time.
“He took long chances, standing up when he went about, and dodging down again, at first. Then when we came close he got down in the bottom of the boat, just as you saw him, and the best we could do was to fire where we thought he ought to be. He dodged back and forth between our boats, tacking right and left as quick as anything I ever saw, and just slipped by us. He couldn’t have done it in any ordinary boat, but that yacht just spun around like a weather-vane, and seemed to gain headway as she went about, instead of losing anything.
“I never saw anything so beautiful, if I do say it. Look at her now, just eating away there to windward and leaving this harbour out of sight.”
The yacht was, indeed, flying along like the wind. Chambers had got more sail on her now, and they could see him, coolly sitting at the wheel and waving a hand in derision back at them.
“Confound it!” said Burton. “Here we are on an island, with no way of getting a telegram started till the morning boat lands over at Mayville. That will be many hours yet, and I fear he’ll give us the slip for good and all. What luck, that it should have been he, the only seaman of the three, who was left with the boat. Neither of the others could have done what he did. He’s probably studied these waters some, enough to find his way down here, and it will be a hard task ever picking him up again.”
“Yes, but a man can’t conceal a yacht,” said George Warren. “I’d know her anywhere. You can telegraph a description, and the whole coast will be on the watch. You can describe exactly how she looks.”
“Can I?” laughed Miles Burton. “Yes, I can, but that’s all the good it’s likely to do. He’ll have her so changed over, if he gets a day to himself down among those islands, that the man who built her wouldn’t recognize her. It won’t be the first time he has done it. He carries a full equipment aboard, a different set of sails, different fitting spars, different gear of all kinds, and paint to change her colour. Once let him get in near a sheer bluff, where he can lay alongside, with some trees growing close to the water’s edge, so he can rig a tackle and heel her way over, and he will have a yacht of a different colour before she’s many hours older. He did the thing up in Long Island Sound for several years, and changed her name a half a dozen times into the bargain. He’s done some smuggling up along the Canadian border, too, I’m told, and there isn’t a better nor a more daring seaman anywhere in this world. However, we’ll do the best we can. Lend a hand, now, all of you; we’ve got to get that wounded man down over the bluff, or down through the woods, and row him across the cove, where we can get a doctor to dress that wound of his. He’s not dangerously hurt, I believe, but he’s faint and sick, and we must work spry.”
A half-hour later, at the wharf across the cove, before the eyes of an excited crowd, composed of villagers, cottagers, and hotel guests, who had gathered hurriedly at the sound of the firing, there was landed a strange boat-load,—the strangest that had ever come ashore at the harbour. Imagine the amazement of Colonel Witham upon beholding his favourite guest, Mr. Kemble, bundled unceremoniously out of the rowboat, with manacles upon his wrists. Imagine the concern of the villagers when the man French, his wound clumsily swathed in bandages and his face pale and distressed, was lifted ashore and carried bodily up the slip to the nearest shelter. Nothing like it had ever happened before, not in all the island’s history.
“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.
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 yachtEaglehad 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 theFlying Dutchman,” said one, at which the others took their pipes out and chuckled. “You’ll have to get out your oldNancy Janeand 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.