But, brief as was the visitation of the fog, it sufficed to hide all things from sight. And if a boat, in which one boy rowed vigorously, had put forth from the camp of Jack Harvey, down in the woods, and had come up along the shore to the wharf, and the box, which was a part of the belongings of Tom Harris and Bob White, had been lowered from the wharf into the boat and conveyed back to the camp and hidden away there,—if all this had happened, it is safe to say that no one would have seen what was done, nor would any one have been the wiser.
Perhaps some such a thing might, indeed, have occurred, for when Tom and Bob, Henry Burns, and the Warren boys met at the wharf the next fore-noon, they found the box gone. They hunted everywhere, ransacked the storehouse from one end to the other, but it was nowhere to be found.
“And to think that it’s all my fault,” groaned young Joe, as they stood at the edge of the wharf, after the unsuccessful search. “I might have known John Briggs would forget to lock it up! It was left in the open shed there, boys, protected from the rain, and he promised to look out for it; but he must have forgotten. I spoke to him about it the last thing last night, on our way home to the cottage.”
“Was it very valuable?” asked Henry Burns.
“Ask Tom what he thinks,” laughed Bob, while Tom tried to look unconscious, but blushed furiously.
“There’s a pretty sister of mine,” continued Bob, “that thinks so much of us that she spent a week cooking up a lot of things for us to start our camping with. There’s a box full of the best stuff to eat you ever tasted, that somebody will gobble up, I suppose, without once thinking or caring about the one that made them. Pretty tough, isn’t it, Tom?”
Tom turned redder still, and felt of his biceps, as though he was speculating what he would do to a certain person, if that person could only be discovered and come up with.
“I tell you what it is, boys,” said George Warren; “things have had a strange way of disappearing here this summer, as they never did before; and, what’s more, if Jack Harvey and his crew haven’t stolen them, they have at least got the credit for taking the most of it,—and you may depend upon it, that box is down there in the woods, somewhere about that camp.”
“Then what’s to hinder our raiding the camp and getting it?” Tom broke in, angrily. “Bob and I, with two of you, could make a good fight against all of them.”
“No doubt of that, Tom,” answered George Warren; “but there are two things to be considered. First, we want to get the box back; and, second, we are not absolutely certain that they have it. If they have it, you may be certain that it is carefully hidden away, and we shouldn’t recover it by making an attack on them. We must find out where it is hidden first, and then, if we cannot get it away otherwise, we will fight for it.”