Read Ebook: Harper's Young People August 31 1880 An Illustrated Weekly by Various

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Ebook has 378 lines and 20895 words, and 8 pages

BY W. L. ALDEN.

The boys had been on their island for more than a week when they resolved to make an excursion to Schroon, which was the nearest village, in order to get some sugar, coffee, and other necessaries. Schroon Lake, or rather the lower end of it, was not more than five miles from Brandt Lake; but there was a range of high hills between the two, and the village of Schroon was situated at the head of the lake, which was nearly ten miles in length. A long and tiresome journey was, therefore, before them, and they ought to have started early in the morning; but they did not start until nearly eleven o'clock. Harry, Tom, and Joe were to go to Schroon together, and Jim was to stay at the island until six o'clock, when he was to row over to the west shore and bring the others back to the camp.

The trip down the lake was certainly a rather foolhardy one, for there was a good deal of wind and sea, and long before they reached the landing-place it was quite dark. But the boys were anxious to get back to their camp, and for the first time during the cruise they acted somewhat recklessly. However, they met with no accident; and when they had returned the boat to its owner, they set out to cross the hills.

The path was not easy to find in the daylight, and it was next to impossible to find it in the night. A dozen times the boys lost themselves, and were compelled to depend entirely upon the stars to direct their course. The woods had been all cleared away for a space of a mile or a mile and a half wide between the two lakes, except just along the shore of Brandt Lake; so that it was not absolutely necessary for them to keep in the path, as it would have been had they been passing through a thick forest. Still, it was not pleasant to lose the path, and stumble over stones and stumps, and of course it made the journey longer. They must have walked at least seven or eight miles on their way back before they finally reached their own lake at midnight, at the point where they expected to find Jim waiting for them.

Neither Jim nor the boat was there. He had waited until ten o'clock, and then, making up his mind that they had decided to spend the night at Schroon, he rowed back to the island, and went calmly to bed. An hour later a dense fog settled over the lake; and when the tired boys reached the shore they could see but a few yards in front of their eyes.

It was a terrible disappointment, but Harry tried to be cheerful. "We shall have to stay here to-night, boys," said he; "but we will build a good fire and keep warm." Tom said that he thought that was the best thing to do, for without a fire they would suffer severely from the cold, wet fog, and he asked Harry if he had any matches. Harry had none, Joe had none, and Tom had none; so the plan of building a fire came to nothing.

The cold gradually chilled them as they stood talking over their adventure, and their teeth began to chatter. Joe said he wished he could get hold of Jim for about five minutes, so that he could warm himself up by convincing him that he ought not to have taken the boat back to the island. Harry said nothing; but he was wondering whether he would freeze to death in the fog, and tried to remember how travellers overtaken by the snow on the Alps contrive to fight off the terrible drowsiness that steals over them when they are freezing. Tom was more practical. He did not expect to freeze in July, although he was miserably cold; and he did not want to punish Jim for a mistake of judgment. He knew that the house where they were accustomed to get milk was not far off, and that a boat usually lay on the shore near the house; so he proposed to Harry and Joe to borrow the boat, and make their way into the camp.

"If we go to that house at this time of night, we shall get shot," remarked Harry. "The man is an ugly-tempered chap, and I heard him say the other day that if he ever heard anything prowling around the house at night he always fired at it."

"Then we won't ask him for his boat: we'll borrow it without leave, and Jim can bring it back in the morning," replied Tom.

"This is nice conduct for Moral Pirates," said Joe. "Capturing a vessel at night is real piracy, and when Jim takes the boat back, the man will be sure to shoot him. I'm sorry for Jim, but I hope it will be a warning to him not to leave his friends in such a fix that they've either got to borrow a boat without leave, or freeze."

They made their way stealthily and with great difficulty to the place where the boat lay. It was high and dry on the beach, and though the fog hid the house where the owner of the boat lived, the boys knew that it was very near. They launched the boat with the utmost caution, lest any noise should awaken the bad-tempered man with the shot-gun. They had it almost launched, when Harry's foot slipped on a wet stone, and he fell with a loud crash, clinging to the boat, and dragging Tom and Joe down with him.

It was very certain that if anything could wake the owner of the boat, he must be awake by this time; so the boys sprang up, and shoving the boat into the water, regardless of the noise, seized the oars, and rowed away into the fog. When they had gained what they thought was a safe distance from the shore they ceased rowing, and congratulated themselves that they were all right at last. To be sure, Harry had scraped his ankle badly; Tom had forgotten the coffee, and left it on the shore; and Joe had put the sugar in the bottom of the leaky boat, where it was rapidly dissolving into syrup; but they were once more afloat, and expected to reach their comfortable camp within the next twenty minutes.

There was not a particle of air stirring, and not a star was visible, so they had absolutely nothing to steer by. They could not even hear the sound of the water which ordinarily lapped the shore. Still, they were not discouraged. Harry thought he knew which way the camp lay, and so he and Tom rowed in what they imagined was the right direction.

They rowed for two hours without finding the island, and without reaching the shore. They could not understand it. The lake seemed to have grown in the night, and to have reached the size of Lake Ontario. They knew that by daylight they could row across it at its widest part in less than an hour, but now it seemed impossible to find any shore. Joe had just suggested that they had made a mistake in coming back from Schroon, and had walked all the way to Lake Champlain, on which they were now rowing, when the bow of the boat struck the shore.

It was some consolation to know that the lake actually had a shore; but they could not tell what part of the shore they had reached. They pushed off again, and resumed their hopeless search for the camp. A new trouble now harassed them. From seeming to have no shore at all, the lake now seemed to have shrunk to a mere mud puddle. No matter in what direction they rowed, they would strike the shore within ten minutes, and always at a different place. Joe said that he had never dreamed that so much shore and so little lake could be put together.

Toward morning Harry and Tom became too tired to row, and they lay down in the bottom of the wet boat, and tried to keep warm by lying close to each other. Joe took the oars, and tried to row without hitting the shore; but he had hardly dipped his oars when the bow grated on the pebbles. He promptly gave up the attempt, and making the boat fast to a tree, joined Tom and Harry, and shared their misery.

They were much too cold and wretched to sleep, but they managed to keep from growing positively stiff with cold. The sun rose, but it did not for a long time make any impression on the fog. All at once, about seven o'clock, the fog vanished, and the boys found themselves in a little bay near the extreme northerly part of the lake. They had been rowing across this little bay, first in one direction and then in another, during all those miserable hours when they found such an unaccountable quantity of shore.

Of course they rowed down to the camp, where they found Jim still sleeping soundly, with a contented, happy look that was awfully exasperating. They woke him up, and scolded him with all the strength they had left, and then, putting on dry clothes, "turned in," and slept all day. Jim towed the borrowed boat back, but was not shot; and the boys afterward said that, on the whole, they were rather glad that he still lived, and that they would mercifully forgive him.

JED'S FIRST HALF.

BY WILLIAM O. STODDARD.

Jed was thinking.

Anybody who looked at him would have seen that much, for he was standing all alone at the corner, leaning against the big poplar, with both hands in his trousers pockets.

The village was one long "main street," with little short side streets cutting across it, so that it did not have any "middle" to speak of; but the "centre" of it and of everything else was right there before Jed's eyes, on the steps of the grocery. It was in the shape of a stack of boxes of fire-crackers, and Jed was gazing at it.

It had been almost cruel of old Philips, the grocer, to pile them up out there the last week in June, to make Jed and the other boys count their pennies and feel uncomfortable.

Fourth of July was coming, and Jed knew he would not be half ready for it. There were five other little Pullmans, and Jed felt as if he alone could use up "fire-crackers for six."

Think of having one of those boxes--a whole one--with nobody knew how many packs in it!

"I'd treat every boy I know, except Prop Hooker; and mebbe I'd give him some if he'd promise not to throw any more stones at Barlow."

The thought of such riches was a little too much for a boy of nine, and Jed slowly sidled around the trunk of the poplar, as if he were trying to get away, but his eyes did not turn with him. They stuck to the crackers.

"Hullo, my little man, what's your name?"

"Jed, sir."

He had to look up, up, up, to get at the grim, weather-beaten, but not unkindly face of the elderly farmer before him.

"Jed, eh? What's your whole name?"

"Jedediah Rittenhouse Pullman. I live down there in that yellow brick house behind the maple-trees."

"You don't say! Why, if you'd ha' let your name drag after you, the back end of it wouldn't but just be coming out of the front gate now. Can you drive cows?"

"That's what I have to do every night and morning. 'Tain't everybody can drive our brindled heifer neither."

Jed was thinking again. He had made up his mind that the stranger was a head taller than Grandfather Pullman--in fact, that he was taller than any other man in the world, except old Mr. Myer, the maple-sugar man, and he had to stoop to get into his own house.

"You don't say! Well, I'm down here alone, and I've got a loaded team to drive, and I've bought a cow, and I want a smart boy to drive her home for me."

"How far is it?"

"Only to Topham. Little more'n twelve mile. I'll send ye home by somebody. Pay ye well, too. Will you go?"

Jed hesitated a moment, but it was only because he seemed to be listening to a great rattle of fire-crackers to come--a cow-load of them.

"Course I'll go, if mother'll let me."

"We'll see her about it right away. You're just the boy I want. Give you four shillings."

A York shilling was twelve and a half cents, and four of them made half a dollar. Oh, what fire-works!

Mrs. Pullman met them at the door, and the first word she said was, "Why, is that you, Deacon Giddings?"

Then Jed knew it was all right, and while his mother talked with Deacon Giddings, he went and combed his hair, and put on his Sunday hat and a pair of shoes and stockings.

"Jed's a tough little fellow," said his mother, "and he's used to driving cows."

She might have said more than that for him. Even Deacon Giddings had picked him out as the "toughest-lookin' little chap he'd seen in a long time." The deacon was in a hurry, though, and almost before Jed began to realize it, he was dancing around behind a very reluctant and rebellious cow, right up the main street, with his new friend watching him from the seat of the heavily loaded wagon.

"Ain't I glad I brought Barlow along!" said Jed to himself, again and again. "He's a small dog, but he just knows how to bark the best kind."

Barlow was indeed a small dog, very fat and very yellow, and with less than two inches of stubby tail, but he was keeping up a very steady racket at the heels of the cow. He could hardly have done better if he had been a perpetual pack of fire-crackers, going off one at a time.

Once they were out of the village and into the country road, the work became easier, and Barlow could now and then sit down and pant awhile before opening a fresh bark.

"You're the boy for me," said the Deacon, from the wagon. "But ain't you afraid that dog o' yourn'll bark himself to death?"

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