Four in Camp: A Story of Summer Adventures in the New Hampshire Woods

by Ralph Henry Barbour

The events started off with the four-oared barge race. Only Chicora and Trescott entered. The course was a little under two miles in length and led to a buoy near Evergreen Island and return. Chicora’s four got the better of the start, and when the turn was reached they were two lengths to the good. But poor steering around the buoy lost them almost all of that advantage, and the Trescott four were quick to profit. On the return course they overtook Chicora’s boat, passed it a few hundred yards from the finish, and crossed the line a good three lengths in the lead. So first honors went to the green and white, and cheers for Camp Trescott awoke the echoes.

Chicora did better in the race for steel boats, her entry, manned by Joe Carter, finishing a hundred feet ahead of the Wickasaw boat, which in turn led the Trescott skiff by many yards.

The fifty-yard swimming race for boys under sixteen brought out a large number of entries, Chicora offering seven of the number. Her hopes rested on “Kid” Rooke. With such a large field there was lots of crowding and splashing at the line, and many a good swimmer was put out of it at the start. Rooke luckily had the forethought to swim under water for the first eight or ten strokes and so avoided some of the youths who, with little hope of winning themselves, were anxious to get in the way of dangerous rivals. It was a pretty contest from start to finish, Rooke fighting it out to the very end with Peterson of Wickasaw and White of Trescott and only winning by an arm’s length in fifty seconds. The race over the same course for the elder boys proved a walkover for an eighteen-year-old Wickasaw youth, who never had to hurry, and finished in forty-seven seconds.

In the half-mile event Tom entered for Chicora and found himself opposed to two Wickasaw and three Trescott fellows. The course was laid straight out from the landing to a boat moored off Bass Island. The swimmers were to round the boat and return on the same course. The six contestants lined up on the edge of the landing and at the word from Mr. Powers of the Wickasaw Camp dove head foremost and struck out for the stake-boat.

Tom wasn’t much at sprinting, and so when half the distance out had been covered he was several yards behind the leaders. But the pace had been a fast one, and Tom knew that sooner or later it must slow down. And it did. As the six approached the boat, the leaders, two Trescott fellows, were swimming at ordinary speed and were making hard work of it. They turned homeward first, but after that dropped rapidly behind. A quarter of the way back Tom, still swimming the same stroke he had started with, passed them and pulled himself into third place. Twenty yards farther on he came abreast of the Wickasaw crack; while, still maintaining a good lead, sped the third Trescott entry.

On the landing and along the curving shore of the cove and out on the point scantily attired youths were jumping and shouting encouragement to the swimmers. Cheers for Chicora, for Wickasaw, and for Trescott mingled. A hundred yards from the finish it seemed that Trescott had the race beyond a doubt. But Tom, twenty yards in the rear and well past the Wickasaw rival, still swam steadily, hand over hand, burying his face in the water at every stroke, and putting every ounce of strength into his work. Not quite every ounce, either, for when some eighty yards from the finish his arms began to move just a little faster but not less regularly, and the distance between first and second men slowly lessened. Chicora saw this and her cheers took on a more hopeful note.

If Tom couldn’t sprint, at least he had wisely saved something for just such an emergency as this. It wasn’t so much that he increased his stroke as that he put more power into it. With fifty yards yet to cover he had cut the twenty yards in half, and he was still gaining. Trescott’s cries grew frantic, but her representative failed to respond. He had made a long, hard race, had set the pace all the way from the turn, and had used himself up in striving to beat the Wickasaw swimmer, whom he had believed to be the only dangerous opponent. And now he had nothing in reserve. The nearer he fought to the finish line the weaker grew his strokes, and Tom, swimming like a piece of machinery, moving arms and legs slowly but powerfully, came abreast of him sixty feet from the line, and without raising his dripping head from the surface or altering his stroke a mite drew steadily away from him and won by ten or twelve feet in the creditable time of seventeen minutes and nineteen and two-fifths seconds. And Chicora laughed and cheered as Dan walked into the water up to his knees and, lifting Tom bodily in his arms, brought him ashore in triumph.

Meanwhile Trescott had won the fifty-yard underwater race and Wickasaw had come in first at the same distance, swimming on the back. Chicora again triumphed in the canoe race for doubles when Carter and Dan drove the former’s crimson craft across the finish fifty or sixty feet ahead of the opponents. And again, in the diving contest, Dan excelled. But after that the blue and gray was forced to take second and third places. Trescott won the relay race, the tilting and the fancy swimming contests. Wickasaw won the canoe race for singles and the tub race. As only first places counted, the sports came to an end with the question of supremacy still in doubt, Chicora and Trescott each having won five events and Wickasaw four.

It was dusk by this time, and audience and competitors hurried away for supper, to reassemble at eight o’clock for the fireworks and boat parade. The latter, at least, was well worth seeing. There were over forty boats in line, the Chicora leading, and each was gay with Chinese lanterns and colored fire. In and out across the lake they went, rounding the islands, skirting the shores, and tracing strange patterns on the dark surface of the water. On the point sky-rockets and bombs sizzed and boomed their way upward in trails of fire, and from the Chicora and the Wickasaw Roman candles spilled their colored stars into the lake.

In Joe Carter’s canoe he and Bob paddled along near the end of the parade, while Tom, attired in a hastily improvised costume of Turkey red, impersonated a rather stout Devil and flourished a pitchfork, while at his feet red fire burned in a tin plate and made his round face almost as lurid as his costume. They had lots of fun out of it, but the crowning glory of their enjoyment came when they accidentally ran into a Wickasaw canoe and spilled two boys and a councilor into the lake. They worked heroically at the task of rescue—when their laughter would allow them to—and none of the three unfortunate “Wicks” sustained further damage than a good wetting. After that the fun was tame until, shortly before ten, they reached their landing and the “Devil” slipped on the edge of the wharf and went down to his waist in water and sputtered and stammered as no Devil ever has before or since. Joe said he was sure he heard the water sizzle when Tom struck it.