The Rival Campers; Or, The Adventures of Henry Burns

by Ruel Perley Smith

“You bet!” replied Bob. “We can turn in and sleep this afternoon. Count me in, for one.”

“Then,” said George, “suppose we all start from our cottage at ten o’clock to-night. We’ll launch the rowboat from the beach and slip across and look things over.”

So it was agreed.

The yacht had long turned the head of the island and was beating down alongshore in the eastern bay. Presently they rounded the bluff and came into the cove. It was nearly noon.

High up on the bluff, and several rods back from the edge of the cliffs, was the old farmhouse; it stood out conspicuously, though at some distance from the water-front, for the land rose quite sharply and the house occupied the top of the eminence. Around it, on all sides except that facing the village, was a dark, heavy growth of hemlocks and pines. It was a mysterious, shadowy place, even by day; but when darkness set in about it, standing off solitary and alone, as it did, from the rest of the village, with the waters lying between, it is little wonder that superstition inhabited it with ghosts and that it was a spot to be shunned.

At the outermost end of the cliffs that protruded into the bay, a ravine, where the ledge at some time had been rent apart, led from the water up toward the cottage, affording a precarious pathway. There was a natural stairway of rock for some distance from the water’s edge, and at the end nearest the old house a series of clumsy wooden stairs led up from the ravine to the surface of the bluff. These were now old and rather rickety; but a light person, at some risk, could still use them.

The villagers, as a rule, avoided the house and this pathway to the bluff. If they had occasion to go ashore there, they usually landed farther up the cove at a beach, and walked through the woods at a distance from the house. No one cared to go very near it.

When the sloop had come to anchor in the cove opposite the Warren cottage, the boys took a boatload of mackerel ashore, besides a basketful in the canoe. They carried them around to every cottage in the village, and even to the hotel, though, as George Warren remarked, they would have to get Colonel Witham out of bed some night in a hurry to make up for it.

Certainly the village, supping that night on their catch, was inclined to forget and forgive them many a prank that had been stored up for future punishment.

When Henry Burns made his exit across the roof that night, he made a careful survey before climbing out on it to see that the stranger was not there. There were no signs of him, and Henry got away safely. Tom and Bob were at the Warren cottage when he arrived. Everything was in readiness, and they all set out for the shore.