Our old readers will be able to recall, too, the bungalow, and the lake, and the country surrounding them. These environments formed the scene of the first volume of this series—“The Bungalow Boys.”
How different the little Maine lake looked now to its appearance the last time we saw it. Then it was swollen, angry, and discolored by the tumultuous waters of a cloudburst. At the water gate leading to the old lumber flume stood Tom Dacre and Sam Hartley, horror on their faces, while out on the lake, clinging to a capsized canoe, were two figures—those of a man and a boy. Suddenly the man raises his hand, and the next instant a cowardly blow has left him the sole occupant of the drifting canoe. Swept on by the current, the lad, his features distorted by fear, is being sucked into the angry waters of the flume, when a figure leaps into the water to the rescue, and——
But we are wandering from the present aspect of things. All that happened a good while ago, when the Bungalow Boys were having their troubles with the “Trubblers,” as old Jasper used to call them. At that time the little valley, not far from the north branch of the Penobscot River, was, as we know, tenanted by a desperate gang of rascals bent on ousting the lads from their strange legacy.
Everything is very different in the valley now. The old lumber camp up the creek—in the waters of which Jumbo, the big trout, used to lurk—has been painted and carpentered, and carpeted and furnished, till you wouldn’t know it for the same place. Mrs. Sambo Bijur, a worthy widow, is conducting a boarding house there to the huge disgust of the boys. Somehow, exciting—perilously so—as the old days often were, they have several times caught themselves wishing they were back again.
“It’s getting awfully tame,” were Tom’s words only the day before, when he had finished fishing the youngest of the Soopendyke family—of New York—out of the lake in which the said youngest member of the Soopendykes had been bent on drowning himself, or so it seemed. His distracted mother had rushed up and down on the shore the while.
“Like an old biddy that has discovered one of her chickens to be a duck,” chuckled Jack, in relating the story.
“And she kissed me,” chimed in Tom, with intense disgust, “and said I was a real nice boy, and if I’d come up to the boarding house some day she’d let me have a saucer of ice cream.”
Mr. Dacre had laughed heartily at this narration.
“Too old for ice cream since we defeated the wiles of Messrs. Walstein, Dampier and Co.—eh, Tom?” he exclaimed, leaning back in his big chair on the bungalow porch and laughing till the tears ran down his weather-beaten cheeks.
“It—it isn’t that, sir,” Jack had put in, “but a fellow—well, he objects to being slobbered over.”