The Rival Campers; Or, The Adventures of Henry Burns

by Ruel Perley Smith

The article stated further that Mr. Curtis was positive he could identify the man who subsequently bound and gagged him, his mask having but partially concealed his face. He was, he said, a man of about medium height, with black hair, black moustache, and heavy black beard, broad-shouldered, thick-set, and unusually active and powerful.

All this, as it was read aloud, threw the guests into the greatest possible excitement, as a great part of them were from the very town and knew the Curtis family, by reputation if not personally.

It did not, of course, interest the stranger guest, for he nodded in his chair and nearly dozed off several times during the reading. Still, when the guests had dispersed, he picked up the paper from a chair and took it with him to his room.

It was the very next night following that of his arrival that Henry Burns met with a surprise.

On the night in question there was a full moon about half-past ten o’clock, and, as Henry had agreed with Tom and Bob to meet them at their tent, he opened his window, stepped out on to the ledge and started to climb to the roof.

Mackerel had struck in at the western bay, and the boys had planned to paddle down the island that night, carry their canoe across the short strip of land that saved the island from being cut into almost equal halves by the sea, launch it again in the western bay, and paddle around to where the Warren boys’ sloop lay anchored in Fish Hawk’s Cove. Then they were all to try for mackerel early in the morning.

Henry Burns stepped softly out, grasped the lightning-rod, and, with a quickness that would have amazed the worthy Mrs. Carlin, scrambled to the ledge over the top of his window. There he paused a moment for breath, and then climbed up the lightning-rod, hand over hand, and gained the roof.

He had proceeded then across the roof but a little ways, when he heard suddenly, almost directly beneath him, the sound of footsteps. Some one was coming up the stairs that led to the roof.

Henry Burns had barely time to conceal himself behind a chimney when the trap-door in the roof was softly opened, and he saw the head and shoulders of a man emerge through the opening. Henry Burns lay flat on the roof, in the dark shadow cast by the chimney. The moon shone full in the man’s face, and Henry Burns saw, to his amazement, that it was the stranger guest. The sickly, weak expression in the man’s face was gone, and in its stead there was a sinister, bold look, which seemed far more natural to his powerful physique.

Suddenly the man, with the strength and ease of an athlete, sprang lightly out on to the roof. He still carried his cane, but he had no use for it, save to clutch it in one hand more after the manner of a cudgel than a cane.