The Campers Out; Or, The Right Path and the Wrong

by Edward Sylvester Ellis

He resolved to do so. Knowing that his uncle was absent, he managed to climb into the rear of his own home without discovery. Making his way to his room without disturbing any one, he changed his clothing, putting on a slouch hat, which could be pulled down over his face so as to hide most of his features. Then, drawing up the collar of his coat, he sneaked out again by the way he had entered without his presence having been suspected by his aunt or any of the servants.

Bob always had abundance of money at command, so no inconvenience was likely to result from lack of funds. It was three miles to the nearest railroad station, but the walk was not a trying one on this cool night in autumn, and he easily made it.

Luck was certainly with the young scapegrace on that eventful evening. The hour was so late that he encountered only one person on the road. He was an old farmer, so tipsy that he would not have recognized his own mother in broad daylight. He paid no attention to the solitary figure on the highway, with his slouch hat drawn far down over his face and his collar about his ears, as though it were midwinter.

Reaching the station just as the night express was starting, he leaped upon the rear platform without stopping to purchase a ticket, and thus escaped another danger of recognition. He saw no one in the car that he knew, and the conductor who collected his fare was also a stranger.

Thus Bob succeeded in getting away from Piketon without a living person suspecting the fact.

Arriving in the metropolis he went to the Astor House, where he registered under an assumed name. He had been in New York before, and breathed somewhat freely, believing that the great city offered better facilities for concealment from the authorities than can be found in the fastnesses of the Rocky Mountains.

Conscience makes cowards of us all, and Bob could never feel perfectly secure. He feared every stranger whom he encountered on the streets and who looked sharply at him was an officer that suspected his identity and was meditating his arrest.

Even when he read in the papers the account of the disaster at Piketon, and saw the name of Wagstaff and himself as the two worthy young men that were drowned, he failed to obtain the consolation that might have been expected. He was known to a good many in New York, and feared he could not keep his secret much longer.

In this distressful state he dispatched a messenger boy to the home of Jim McGovern, with the request that he would come to a certain room at the Astor House to meet a person on important business. Bob did not send a note or give his name, so that when the wondering Jim presented himself at the famous hostelry, it was without the remotest suspicion of whom he was to meet.

Possibly the amazement of McGovern may be imagined when he stood in the presence of the former captain of the Piketon Rangers and listened to his story.