The Rival Campers; Or, The Adventures of Henry Burns

by Ruel Perley Smith

When they had made a second and unavailing search for anything that might have escaped the destruction, and some half-hour after the villagers had departed, the crew went back to the tent and laid themselves down again for a morning’s nap. They were soon off to sleep, save one.

As often as he closed his eyes, Jack Harvey could see, in his mind’s eye, Tom Harris come again to the door of the tent; and he could see him start back and almost fall. Could Tom Harris have had anything to do with the explosion? And if so, how? It hardly seemed possible, but Harvey could not put the idea out of his head. Tom’s frightened face looked in at him, in his troubled sleep that morning, and, long before his crew were awake again and stirring, he rose and stole out of the tent to the shore, where the cave had been.

And so, while Tom and Bob rolled in on to their bunks that morning, thankful in their hearts that no harm had come to the crew, Jack Harvey was down there by the shore, examining the ground over and over again, every inch of it, from the place where the entrance to the cave had been to the place where the canoe had been made fast. Much of the bank had been torn away there, but where the canoe had been moored there was a spot for some few feet that was undisturbed. Jack Harvey, after studying the spot carefully, went back to camp. If he had found anything that surprised him, he did not, for the present, mention it to his crew.

Jack Harvey was a curious mixture of good and bad qualities. His parents were wealthy, but uneducated and unrefined. They allowed him to have all the money he wished to spend, and permitted him to do pretty much as he pleased about everything. Harvey’s father had been a miner, and had “struck it rich,” after knocking about the California gold-fields for nearly a score of years. Because he had managed to get along well in the world without any education, and without the influence of any restraint, such as society imposes, he had a theory that it was the best thing for a boy to work out his own upbringing. As a consequence, his son was rarely thwarted in anything. Left to himself, Harvey, though not naturally bad, fell in with a rough, lawless class of boys, read only the cheapest kind of books, which inspired him to lead an idle, good-for-nothing life, and, as a result, went wild.

He was strong and, among his associates, a leader. They gladly awarded him this distinction, as they were, for the most part, poor, and he spent his allowance freely. He was captain of a ball nine, for which he bought the uniforms and the necessary equipment; captain of his yacht’s crew, and, in all things, their acknowledged leader. His companions came generally to be known as Harvey’s crew.

Tom and Bob had a mere speaking acquaintance with him, as they all attended the same school at home,—from which, however, Harvey was more often truant than present. Beyond that association they had nothing to do with him. There were four members of the yacht’s crew, although that term was applied by the people of the town to some dozen or more boys. Of these four, Joe Hinman was a thin, hatchet-faced, shrewd-looking boy, whose father was employed by a railroad in some capacity that kept him much away from home; George Baker and Allan Harding were cousins, whose parents had a rather doubtful reputation, as dealers in second-hand goods and articles pawned, at a little shop in an obscure quarter of the town. Tim Reardon had no parents that he knew of, and earned an uncertain living, doing chores and working at odd jobs through the winter. In the summer, he was usually to be found aboard Harvey’s yacht, where he was fairly content to do the drudgery, for the sake of the livelihood and the fun of yachting and camping.

It was not the sort of companionship that a wise and careful parent would have chosen for his son, but they sufficed for Harvey, and no one interfered with him. These boys did as he said, and that was what he wanted.

Nearly every one in the entire village had gone down to Harvey’s camp in the next hour following the explosion. Curiously enough, however, Henry Burns was not of this number. He had jumped out of bed at the crash and the shock, and had hastily dressed and rushed down-stairs, ready to go with the crowd. For once, however, Mrs. Carlin got ahead of him.

“Why, Henry Burns,” she had exclaimed, catching sight of him as he dodged out of the door. “Where do you think you are going at this hour of the night, and you that was feeling so bad only a few hours ago. You’re not going off through those woods to-night, not if I know it. You can just take yourself back to bed, if you don’t want to be laid up with a sick spell.”

And Henry Burns, now that attention was thus publicly attracted to him, did not dare to steal out later and join the others, lest Mrs. Carlin should hear of it, and, perchance, become suspicious of him. So he went back unwillingly to bed, but not to sleep. He was wide-awake when the angry party returned. Listening from his window, he heard their description of the explosion and their impudent reception by Harvey’s crew; and proceeded to draw his own conclusion from it all.