Camp Venture: A Story of the Virginia Mountains

by George Cary Eggleston

Some Features of the Situation

Every morning Tom "prowled," as he put it, all around the camp, "just to see how things are," he said.

Two mornings after the talk reported in the last chapter Tom found, out under the bluff, a big bag of rye meal or rather of rye coarsely ground for whiskey making purposes. He dragged it over the hard snow to camp and opened it. In its mouth he found a piece of paper and written upon it in rude letters was the following:

Tom called all the boys into conference before deciding what to do with this present. He said to them:

"Bill's ideas of morality are somewhat confused. In his eagerness to render me some return for my act in letting him go back to his 'little gal' on parole, he wanted to give me the meal I brought to camp the other morning. It never occurred to him that as the meal didn't belong to him, he had no right to give it to me, and all I could say to him was utterly futile as an effort to make him take a moral or rational view of the case. Now I am seriously afraid our friend Bill stole this rye meal. That would perfectly fit in with his ideas of morality, gratitude and all that sort of thing. Still we don't know that he did steal it. After all I did pay him a double price for the meal we got, and possibly he has applied part of the surplus payment to the purchase of this additional supply from his criminal friends the distillers. After all I have no means of knowing that he ever paid the original owners of that first meal any part of the money that I gave him for it. He couldn't see at the time why he shouldn't steal it for me, and so he may have stolen this."

"Well," said the Doctor, "you honestly paid him for the former supply of meal, insisting that you wouldn't take it at all unless you paid for it. He understands that perfectly. He has a sufficient sense of honesty now to bring you an additional bag on the ground that you paid an excessive price for the former supply and that he wants to make it 'skwar.' I don't see how we can go behind that, especially as we cannot possibly return the meal either to him or to its owners if he stole it. Our only option is to eat the stuff or take it back out there to the foot of the bluff and leave it there to rot."

After some further discussion it was decided to eat the rye meal as practically the only thing that could be done with it.

One week later another bag of meal—corn meal this time—was found out under the bluff, but with it came no explanation of any kind. Thus the bread supply in Camp Venture was made secure for a time at least, and for a meat supply the guns did all that was necessary—especially Tom's gun, for Tom spent many of his hours wandering over the mountains in search of game, and Tom rarely sought game in vain.

It was coming on to be March now, and the weather had greatly moderated. The snow was melting off the mountains and the spring rains were falling freely.