The Rival Campers Part 10

This was the satisfaction, then, that the rescuers got at the hands of the crew. They had come, burying their grievances, and with hearts full of sympathy and kindness for the unfortunate boys, and they had encountered only the same reckless crew, that mocked them for their pains. So they turned away again, angry and disappointed, and nursing their wrath for a day to come.

And then, as the sound of the last of their footsteps died away through the woods, Jack Harvey, chuckling with vast satisfaction to himself, said: "Wasn't that fine, though? Wasn't old Brackett and the others furious?"

"Wild!" exclaimed Joe Hinman. "But I don't think, after all, Jack, that it paid. We ought to have treated them better, after they had come all the way down here to help us."

"Pshaw!" answered Harvey. "Don't you go getting squeamish, Joe. For my part, I'm mad enough at somebody to fight the whole village. There's our cave that it took us weeks to dig, and hidden in the only spot around here that couldn't be discovered, gone to smash, with everything we had in it. Those two guns that the governor bought me were worth a pretty price, let me tell you. They must have gone clear into the bay, for I can't even find a piece of the stock of either one of them."

"It looks to me as though somebody did discover the cave, after all,"

said Joe Hinman. "You can't make me believe that it blew itself up."

"Nonsense!" exclaimed Harvey-and then he paused abruptly; for, of a sudden, there came sharply to his mind the white face of Tom Harris, peering in at the tent door, with a haggard, ghastly expression. He recalled how Tom had started back and nearly fallen at the sight of the crew lying still.

"He was the first one at the tent, too," muttered Harvey to himself.

"What's that?" asked Joe Hinman.

"Nothing," said Harvey. "But you may be right, Joe. You may be right, after all. Come, let's all go out and look over the ground once more.

There may be a few things yet, to save from the wreck."

The explosion, strangely enough, had not injured a single member of the crew. Not a piece of the wreckage had struck the tent. Pieces of rock and bits of branches and boards lay on every hand about the camp, and a stone, torn from the bank, had crashed down on the bowsprit of the _Surprise_, breaking it short off, carrying away rigging and sails. There was also a hole broken in the yacht's deck by a falling piece of ledge.

The crew, awakened from sound slumber by the awful crash and by the shower of earth and stones, had rushed out, frightened half out of their wits, and at an utter loss at first to know what had happened. The full discovery of what had occurred only served to deepen the mystery. How it had happened no one could tell. To be sure, they knew what had escaped the notice of Tom and Bob, that four lanterns in a corner of the cave were filled with kerosene oil, and that in another corner, in a hole under the floor, covered with a few pieces of board and a thin sprinkling of earth, were two kegs of blasting-powder.

It had been a narrow escape for them. A hole was torn in the bank big enough to hold several yachts the size of the _Surprise_. Not a vestige remained to show that a cave had ever been dug there. Several boulders had been dislodged from the bank and carried bodily down to the water's edge, besides the one that had hit the bowsprit of the _Surprise_. Of the stuff that Tom and Bob had placed carefully outside the cave, not a sc.r.a.p remained. Every bit of it must have been blown into the sea. But not a rock nor so much as a stick had struck the tent. Beyond being dazed for some moments by the shock of the explosion, not one of the crew was hurt.

When they had made a second and unavailing search for anything that might have escaped the destruction, and some half-hour after the villagers had departed, the crew went back to the tent and laid themselves down again for a morning's nap. They were soon off to sleep, save one.

As often as he closed his eyes, Jack Harvey could see, in his mind's eye, Tom Harris come again to the door of the tent; and he could see him start back and almost fall. Could Tom Harris have had anything to do with the explosion? And if so, how? It hardly seemed possible, but Harvey could not put the idea out of his head. Tom's frightened face looked in at him, in his troubled sleep that morning, and, long before his crew were awake again and stirring, he rose and stole out of the tent to the sh.o.r.e, where the cave had been.

And so, while Tom and Bob rolled in on to their bunks that morning, thankful in their hearts that no harm had come to the crew, Jack Harvey was down there by the sh.o.r.e, examining the ground over and over again, every inch of it, from the place where the entrance to the cave had been to the place where the canoe had been made fast. Much of the bank had been torn away there, but where the canoe had been moored there was a spot for some few feet that was undisturbed. Jack Harvey, after studying the spot carefully, went back to camp. If he had found anything that surprised him, he did not, for the present, mention it to his crew.

Jack Harvey was a curious mixture of good and bad qualities. His parents were wealthy, but uneducated and unrefined. They allowed him to have all the money he wished to spend, and permitted him to do pretty much as he pleased about everything. Harvey's father had been a miner, and had "struck it rich," after knocking about the California gold-fields for nearly a score of years. Because he had managed to get along well in the world without any education, and without the influence of any restraint, such as society imposes, he had a theory that it was the best thing for a boy to work out his own upbringing. As a consequence, his son was rarely thwarted in anything. Left to himself, Harvey, though not naturally bad, fell in with a rough, lawless cla.s.s of boys, read only the cheapest kind of books, which inspired him to lead an idle, good-for-nothing life, and, as a result, went wild.

He was strong and, among his a.s.sociates, a leader. They gladly awarded him this distinction, as they were, for the most part, poor, and he spent his allowance freely. He was captain of a ball nine, for which he bought the uniforms and the necessary equipment; captain of his yacht's crew, and, in all things, their acknowledged leader. His companions came generally to be known as Harvey's crew.

Tom and Bob had a mere speaking acquaintance with him, as they all attended the same school at home,-from which, however, Harvey was more often truant than present. Beyond that a.s.sociation they had nothing to do with him. There were four members of the yacht's crew, although that term was applied by the people of the town to some dozen or more boys. Of these four, Joe Hinman was a thin, hatchet-faced, shrewd-looking boy, whose father was employed by a railroad in some capacity that kept him much away from home; George Baker and Allan Harding were cousins, whose parents had a rather doubtful reputation, as dealers in second-hand goods and articles p.a.w.ned, at a little shop in an obscure quarter of the town.

Tim Reardon had no parents that he knew of, and earned an uncertain living, doing ch.o.r.es and working at odd jobs through the winter. In the summer, he was usually to be found aboard Harvey's yacht, where he was fairly content to do the drudgery, for the sake of the livelihood and the fun of yachting and camping.

It was not the sort of companions.h.i.+p that a wise and careful parent would have chosen for his son, but they sufficed for Harvey, and no one interfered with him. These boys did as he said, and that was what he wanted.

Nearly every one in the entire village had gone down to Harvey's camp in the next hour following the explosion. Curiously enough, however, Henry Burns was not of this number. He had jumped out of bed at the crash and the shock, and had hastily dressed and rushed down-stairs, ready to go with the crowd. For once, however, Mrs. Carlin got ahead of him.

"Why, Henry Burns," she had exclaimed, catching sight of him as he dodged out of the door. "Where do you think you are going at this hour of the night, and you that was feeling so bad only a few hours ago. You're not going off through those woods to-night, not if I know it. You can just take yourself back to bed, if you don't want to be laid up with a sick spell."

And Henry Burns, now that attention was thus publicly attracted to him, did not dare to steal out later and join the others, lest Mrs. Carlin should hear of it, and, perchance, become suspicious of him. So he went back unwillingly to bed, but not to sleep. He was wide-awake when the angry party returned. Listening from his window, he heard their description of the explosion and their impudent reception by Harvey's crew; and proceeded to draw his own conclusion from it all.

The more he thought of it, the more his suspicion grew that, in some way, Tom or Bob, or both, had had a hand in the thing. Tom, indeed, had expressed his intention to Henry Burns of spying on the camp in his hunt to find the missing box; and, although it seemed a most unlikely hour for him to have gone down there, Henry Burns wisely conjectured that that was what he must have done.

Accordingly, shortly after Henry Burns had arisen that morning, and after he had gathered from a few villagers who were abroad some fuller details of the night's adventures, he made his way to the camp on the point.

There were no signs of life about the camp, and, softly opening the flap of the tent, he peered within. Tom and Bob lay stretched out, sound asleep.

Henry Burns stepped noiselessly inside. He called them by name in a low tone, but they did not awaken.

"Last night's excitement was too much for one of them, at least, I guess," was his comment. And then he added: "If my suspicions are true, their fun lasted later than mine, and was far more exciting-but I'll find that out."

There was a camp-stool beside each bunk, upon which Tom and Bob had thrown their clothes before turning in. Henry Burns quietly removed the clothing from these chairs, made them into a bundle, and, tucking the bundle under his arm, walked out of the tent and lay down on the gra.s.s, just outside.

It seemed to him as though another hour had pa.s.sed before he heard a creaking of one of the bunks, and a voice, which he recognized as Bob's, said: "Hulloa, there, Tom, wake up!"

"Ay, ay," growled Tom, sleepily, but made no move.

Again Bob's voice: "Say, Tom?"

No answer.

"Tom-hulloa, old fellow-come, let's get up. It's late."

"All right, all right, Bob, so it is." And Tom roused up on an elbow and rubbed his eyes. Then he gave a prodigious yawn.

"Whew!" he exclaimed. "What a night I had of it. I don't wonder we slept late, do you?"

"Well, hardly," answered Bob. "My! But I can hear that explosion go off now, it seems to me. And wasn't that an awful sight when the flame shot up against the sky? I'll never forget it as long as I live."

"We'll have to keep our eyes on Harvey after this for awhile," said Tom.

"Hulloa!" he exclaimed, suddenly, as they tumbled out on to the floor.

"Where are our clothes? We left them right here when we turned in, didn't we?"

The boys looked at each other and stared in astonishment.

"Of course we did," answered Bob.

"What can it mean?" gasped Tom.

"Hope to die if I can guess," said Bob. "It's plain enough, though, that some one has been in here while we were asleep and cleaned out our wardrobe. Not a thing left. You don't suppose that Harvey-"

"Nonsense," interrupted Tom. "It's that young scoundrel of a Joe Warren.

He's always up to his monkey-s.h.i.+nes. It's some of his doings. He was the one, mind you, that proposed yesterday that we carry our change of good clothing up to his cottage for safe-keeping. Here we are, now, without a rag to put on."

"I suppose he thinks we'll have to march up to his cottage in blankets, like Indians," said Bob. "Well, if it comes to that, I'll stay right here till night. You don't catch me parading around in a blanket in the daytime, to be laughed at by everybody."

"We'll have to pay him up for this," said Tom.

At this moment Henry Burns appeared at the doorway.

"I have some cheap second-hand clothes here," he said. "They're pretty well worn out, and you can have them for a small consideration, seeing that you need them so bad. I want the money for my poor mother, who's sick at home with the smallpox."

"Scoundrel!" yelled Tom.