The Rival Campers; Or, The Adventures of Henry Burns

by Ruel Perley Smith

His search brought him at length to the northernmost extremity of the island, where he sat down on the beach to rest. Then, as he started to resume his walk, he noticed that the receding tide had left bare a narrow sand-bar, that connected the island on which the cabins stood and the adjacent island, so that he could now pass from one to the other almost dry-shod.

Fondness for exploring was ever Henry Burns’s ruling passion, so he set out across the sand-bar to the neighbouring island, and was pleased to find that the mussel-beds were far more plenty there than he had found them before. This island was not so large as the other Gull Island. It was not more than a half-mile long and about a quarter of a mile across in its widest part. It had, however, the same characteristic of the other, in that its shores were abrupt, and deep water lay all around it.

There was but one small strip of beach, extending out into mud-flats, where Henry Burns could gather mussels; but he soon filled his basket here, and, setting it down in the shade of an overhanging rock, climbed the ledge that now barred his way, and started to make a circuit of the island along the edge of its steep banks.

Henry Burns had a habit of day-dreaming as he walked, unless he happened to be in search of some particular thing, when he was the most alert of youths. So, as he walked, his mind was far away just then, back in the town of Medford, where he pictured to himself familiar objects, and wondered what was happening there.

So it happened that he passed a certain tree close by the shore, only half-noticing that the end of a stout hawser was tied to it, and not paying any attention to it. When he had gone on a rod or two, it suddenly struck him that this was an odd thing, as the hawser was new, and so he went back to look at it. There was a short length of the rope dangling from where it had been made fast about the tree-trunk, and he noticed upon examination that the free end had been severed cleanly by the stroke of a knife.

“That’s odd,” said Henry Burns. “Fishermen don’t usually waste a good piece of hawser like that. Some one was extravagant and in a hurry, or impatient—By Jove! You don’t suppose—”

Henry Burns had lost his preoccupied air in a moment. Following the line from the rope to the edge of the bank, he scrambled carefully down over the face of the ledge to the water’s edge.

Henry Burns was not surprised to discover that the rock was smeared all over with spots of black paint. Moreover, if further evidence were needed that some one had been at work there, there lay in a niche of the ledge an empty keg in which paint had been mixed.

But what elated Henry Burns still more was a discovery he made by a closer examination of the ledge just under water. There at a depth of from one to two feet under water were rough, jagged edges of the rock which had been in contact with some object—an object that had left upon their surface unmistakable smearings or scrapings of paint which was white.

“Hooray!” cried Henry Burns, excitedly, for him. “There it is—the old and the new. There’s where he rubbed against the ledge as he made fast, and here’s the evidence all about on these rocks of his new disguise. And there, right close to the bank, are the trees to which he fastened his tackle. If it isn’t just as Miles Burton said, to the letter, then there’s no trusting one’s eyes.”