The Moral Pirates/Chapter 14

by W. L. Alden

CHAPTER XIV.

HE 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.

When they bade good-bye to Jim, the three other boys assured him that they would certainly be back as early as six o'clock, and warned him not to fail to meet them with the boat. They then started to cross the hills, following a foot-path, that was so little used that it was hardly visible. Unfortunately the path led through a thicket of raspberry bushes, and the fruit was so tempting that the boys lost a good deal of time by stopping to gather it. After a tiresome tramp under the mid-day sun they reached the lower end of Schroon Lake, where they hired a crank little row-boat, and rowed up to Schroon. There was a fresh northerly breeze which delayed them; and the spray from the bow of the boat sprinkled them, so that they were uncomfortably wet when they reached the village. By this time they were very hungry as well as tired, and so they went to the hotel for dinner. It was half-past six o'clock when they started to row down the lake,

BIDDING JIM GOOD-BYE.

and several men who saw them warned them that they were running a good deal of risk in attempting to return at so late an hour.

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 bouse 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 shotgun. They had it almost launched, when Harry's foot slipped on a wet stone, and he fell with a dismal 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 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 sirup; 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.