TOM’S DARING VENTURE

Tom’s teeth were indeed chattering when the company reached their camp. He was chilled “clear through,” he said, and his companions were very uneasy. They feared, and not without reason, that he had contracted a swamp fever, which always begins with a chill. To avoid that, the Rutledge boys, who knew the coast and its dangers, had carefully kept on or very near the salt water, and had chosen for their camp a spot where there were no live oaks, no gray moss and no black sand. Still Tom might have caught a fever.

Cal piled wood on the fire with a lavish hand, so that an abundance of heat might be reflected into their dry bush shelter, the open side of which faced the fire, and Dick busied himself searching out dry clothes from the lockers, while Larry helped Tom to strip himself as speedily as possible.

“Now run and jump into the creek,” he directed, as soon as the last of Tom’s clothes were off. “The salt water is luke-warm or even warmer than that. I’ll wring out your clothes while your bath is warming you, and when you come out we’ll give you a rub down that would stimulate circulation in a bronze statue. Hurry into the water, and don’t hurry out too soon.”

By the time Tom had been rubbed down and had got into dry clothes, he declared himself to be “as warm as a toast, as hungry as a schoolgirl, and ready to stand a rigid examination as to the character and purposes of our scoundrel friends down there.”

“Good!” exclaimed Larry. “That’s proof positive that you haven’t caught the fever. I was afraid you might.”

“Fever? Why, I was as cold as the Arctic circle—but then perhaps you keep your fevers on ice down here and serve ’em cold. You have so many queer ways that nothing surprises me.”

Larry explained, and Tom laughed at him for his pains, for of course Tom knew what he had meant.

It was well past midnight, and the others shared Tom’s hunger in full measure, so they were not greatly disappointed when, in response to their eager demands for the story he had to tell, he answered:

“I’ll tell you all about it when we get something to eat. Till then my loquacity will closely resemble that of a clam.”

One of the party had killed some fat black squirrels during the preceding day, and as these were already “dressed for the banquet,” in Dick’s phrase, they were spread upon a mass of coals, and within a brief while the meal—supper or breakfast, or post-midnight luncheon, or whatever else it might be called—was ready to receive their attention.

“Now, Tom, tell us!” demanded Larry, when their hunger was partially appeased.

“Wait a minute,” interposed Dick. “Isn’t this rather risky?”

“What?”

“Why, sitting here on our haunches, rejoicing in the genial warmth of the fire—over-genial, I should call it, as it’s blistering my knees—and having no sentry out to see that the scoundrels don’t pounce down on us by surprise.”

“There’s no more risk in it,” answered Tom, confidently, “than in wearing socks, or playing dominoes, or trying to trace out the features of the man in the moon.”

“But why not, Tom?”

“Because the scoundrels down there are all dead—dead drunk, I mean—and they have all they can do just now in sleeping it off.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Yes, entirely sure. You saw how they were drinking—half a pint of rum at a dose, repeated every five minutes. Well, they kept that up as long as they could find the way to their mouths. They had emptied the demijohn before you fellows left, and not being satisfied, they got out a keg of the fiery stuff, had a rough and tumble fight over some question relating to it, beat each others’ faces into something very much like Hamburger steaks, and then decided to let the keg arbitrate the dispute. Four or five of them had been arbitrated into a comatose state before I left, another was trying to sing something about ‘Melinda,’ setting forth that he had ‘seen her at the windah,’ and was prepared to give his hat and boots if he could ‘only have been dah.’ The rest were drunkenly silent as they sat there by an open dark lantern which they had forgotten to close, I suppose, and drinking rum from tin cups whenever they could remember to do so. They will give nobody any trouble to-night.”

“But, Tom,” interposed Dick, “how do you know it was rum they were drinking?”

“Now, see here,” said Tom, “I’d like to know who’s telling this story. If I’m the one the rest of you had better let me tell it in my own way. I was going to begin at the beginning and tell it straight through, but your intrusive questions have switched me off the track. Now listen, and I’ll tell you all I know and how I know it, and what I think of it, and what I think you think of it, and all the rest of it.”

“Go ahead, Tom!” said Cal; “I’ll keep the peace for you; you’ll bear me witness that I haven’t spoken a word since you began. Go on!”

“All right,” said Tom. “I thought you were about to give us a disquisition when you began to say that, but you didn’t, so I’ll forgive you. Well, you see when you fellows heard me moving out there in the thicket and thought I was instituting a retreat, I was only changing my base, as the military men say. I had seen something that aroused my curiosity, and my curiosity is like a baby after midnight—if you once rouse it, you simply can’t coax it to go to sleep again.”

“What was it you had seen, Tom?” Larry began.

“Silence!” commanded Cal. “Tom has the floor.”

“Oh, I beg pardon—” Larry began apologetically.

“No, don’t do even that. Go on, Tom.”

“I will as soon as you two twin brothers cease your quarreling. As I was saying, I had seen something that aroused my curiosity. As I was peering through the bushes, looking toward the main body of the roisterers, I saw the limping one slip away from the general company and sneak off. He went very cautiously through the undergrowth to the hovel nearest me and entered it, closing the door after him. I could see a little pencil of light streaming out through a crack, so I knew he had opened his lamp in there. After a little fumbling he came out again, but he was so drunk he forgot to take his lamp with him, as I discovered by the continued streaming out of that little pencil of light.

“That was what aroused my curiosity. I wanted to know what was in that hovel, and as the lame gentleman with the ‘load’ on had obligingly left his lamp there for my accommodation, I resolved to embrace the opportunity offered. I moved cautiously upon the enemy’s works. That is to say, I crept forward toward the hovel. That’s what you fellows mistook for the signal to retreat.

“Now I am convinced that our temporary neighbors, the scoundrels, are disposed to be in all ways obliging. At any rate they had considerately placed the door of the hovel so that it fronted my side of the structure and not theirs. Thus, when I opened the door the light from the burning lamp did not shine toward them and thus give the alarm.

“I entered the place and rather minutely examined its contents.”

“What was in there?” asked Cal, forgetting in his eagerness that he had himself undertaken to prevent the interruption of Tom’s narrative by questions from any source.

“I’ll tell you about that when I come to it. Story first, Cal.

“I had just finished my inspection when I heard footsteps of rather uncertain purpose passing round the hovel toward the door, which of course I had closed behind me. As there is only one door to that hovel and it has no windows by which ‘lovers might enter or burglars elope’—that’s wrong end first but it’s no matter—I realized that there was no time to lose. I hurriedly settled down behind a pile of cigar boxes—”

“Their plunder is cigars, then?” asked Dick, forgetting.

“I did not say so,” Tom answered teasingly. “I made no mention of cigars, so far as I can remember. I spoke only of cigar boxes. They might be filled with anything, you know. At any rate your interruption has spoiled the most thrilling part of my narrative, which must now be continued prosaically and without the dramatic fire and fervor I had planned to put into it.

“My concealment was hasty and at best very imperfect. In my haste I forgot to conceal my gun, which stuck up a foot or two above the barrier of boxes that imperfectly hid my person. Fortunately, however, the lame gentleman was too blind drunk even to see double and, as he made no mention of the matter, I refrained from alluding to it.

“Apparently he had entered the hovel with a single purpose, namely, to close his lantern and take it away. With what I cannot help regarding as praiseworthy persistence, he carried out that purpose, giving heed to nothing else. He omitted even to close the door after him, and as the place was without heating apparatus of any kind—except rum for internal combustion—I took my leave as soon as I felt confident that the lame gentleman had either rejoined his comrades or had fallen into dreamless slumber on his way to do so. My next adventure was the head-on collision with Larry in the trail.”

Tom paused, took another bite at the squirrel’s leg he had been eating between sentences, and it seemed necessary to set him going again by means of questions.

“Why don’t you go on, Tom? You haven’t told us yet what you found in the hut.”

“I’m thirsty,” answered the boy. “Speaking is dry work, as you know, if you ever read Hawthorn’s ‘A Rill from the Town Pump!’ Have we enough water in the spring, Cal, for me to waste it in slaking my thirst?”

“We’ve caught all our things full, I reckon. I’ll see.”

When Cal returned he brought with him a small supply of rain water.

“What made you so long about it, Cal?” asked Larry. “We’re all waiting for you.”

“So I see,” answered Cal. “I make all required apologies for having kept this distinguished company waiting while I attended to some matters that are even more vitally interesting to all of us than is Tom’s promised inventory of the things discovered by him in the tents of the wicked, if I may so designate a slab hovel in a cane brake.”

“What have you been doing, Cal? And why didn’t you call the rest of us to help you?” asked Dick, whose New England conscience was apt to scourge his spirit if he thought he had been doing less than his share of whatever there was to do.

“I’ll reply to your questions in inverse order,” Cal replied. “I did not call for help because I did not need help. In what I had to do one person was as good as a dozen. I may have been a trifle slow about it, but that is chiefly because water won’t run through a hole faster than nature intended it to do. As for your other question, I’ve been engaged in a job of water-supply engineering. All the receptacles I set to catch water were nearly full, and as it still rains—a fact that you may have observed for yourselves—I thought it best to empty their contents into the water kegs and set them to catch more. As nobody thought to bring a funnel along, I have had to resort to simpler methods, and I have found that it is by no means easy to pour water from a four-gallon bait pail into a one-inch bung hole without spilling it. For the rest, Captain Larry, I beg to report that one of our water kegs is now full and the other perhaps one-third full. I hope to catch enough more water before the rain ceases to finish filling that keg and to serve all camp purposes during the few hours that we shall probably remain here.”

“Why, I should think we might stay as long as we like, now,” said Tom; “this rain must have filled up our spring.”

“It has, and it has spoiled it for use for many days to come.”

“But how?” persisted Tom.

“Let me remind you, Tom, that we are all eagerly waiting for you to tell us some things that are distinctly more interesting to us than the condition and prospects of a swamp spring can be when we’ve enough water for our present and immediate future need. Go on with your story.”

“Oh, the story is finished,” Tom replied, “but you want to hear about the contents of the hovel. They consist in part of little kegs—three or five gallon kegs, I should think—of Santa Cruz Rum. At least that’s what I made out the letters branded on them to mean. These kegs are lying on the ground in rows that impressed me as far more orderly than the scoundrels themselves ever think of being. I should say there are fifteen or twenty of the kegs in that hovel.

“The rest of the stuff consists of cigars in boxes, and the boxes are carefully tied together in parcels—thirty boxes to the parcel. That’s the way we all saw them carry them up from their boats.”

“Where on earth can they have got all that rum and all those cigars, anyhow? And what do they bring them away down here in the woods for, I wonder?” speculated Dick. “What’s your guess, Tom?”

“Pirates,” answered Tom; “and those things are their plunder.”

“Curious sort of pirates,” said Cal, scoffingly. “Unlike any pirates I ever heard of. Why, Tom, did you ever hear of pirates contenting themselves with taking the rum and cigars they found on the ships they overhauled? You’ve got to guess two or three times more if you’re going to guess right.”

“Well, what do you think they are?” asked Tom, a trifle disappointed to find his theory bowled over so easily.

“Smugglers,” answered Cal. “And I don’t just think it either—I know.”

“But, Cal,” interrupted Larry, “smugglers must bring their goods from foreign ports, and we all know enough about boats to know that those flat-bottomed tubs of theirs wouldn’t live five minutes in a little blow on blue water.”

“No, nor five seconds either, and those precious rascals know all that quite as well as we do. For that reason, among others, they refrain from risking their valuable lives by venturing upon blue water.”

“Then how do they carry on their traffic?”

“I have often remonstrated with you, Larry, for your neglect to read the newspapers. But for that you might have been as well informed on this and other subjects as I am. About a month ago I read in a New York newspaper that fell in my way a somewhat detailed account of the way in which certain kinds of smuggling is carried on along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts wherever the conditions are favorable, and the conditions are nowhere so favorable as right here on this South Carolina coast, where deep, but often very narrow and crooked, inlets and creeks open from the broader waters of the sounds directly into densely wooded regions that are often wholly unpeopled for many miles in every direction.

“This is the way they do it: Schooners and other small sea-going craft load at West Indian ports and take out clearance papers for New York or Halifax or some other big port which can be best reached by skirting this coast. Under pretense of stress of weather, or shortness of water or provisions, they put into some harbor of refuge like that sound out there. They make no effort to land anything, and if questioned by the revenue officers they can show perfectly regular papers. Then when opportunity offers, their shore gangs—like the one over there—slip out in the darkness, take on full loads of freight, and land it in some secluded spot like the one down there, and the schooner sails away to her destination.”

“But how do they get their goods from the woods to market?” Tom asked.

“By wagons, I suppose, and a little at a time. That doesn’t concern us very deeply. What does concern us, is that we’ve got to get away from here as soon as this rain stops. The clouds seem to be breaking, by the way, and the wind has shifted to the northwest,” said Cal, stepping out of the shelter to observe the weather. “It will clear pretty early in the morning, I think, and in the meantime I for one want to get a little sleep.”

“But what’s the hurry, Cal?” asked Tom. “Why can’t we stay here a day or two longer? I’d like to see what the smugglers do when they come to.”

“There are several reasons for getting away at once,” answered Cal. “For one thing, we’re running short of some necessary supplies and must go to Beaufort to replenish our stores. Then there’s the question of water supply. After I finish filling the kegs we’ll have barely enough left to get through the day on.”

“But how has the rain put the spring out of commission, Cal?” asked Tom. “You promised to explain that.”

“By filling it full of surface water. It will be a week or more before the water there is fit to drink, at least as a steady diet.”

“There’s a much better reason than that,” said Larry.

“What is it?”

“Why, we must hurry to put ourselves in communication with the authorities, so that they can come down on that place before the scoundrels get away, or get their plunder away.”

“Yes,” said Tom, who was reluctant to leave the place and give up the adventure, “I suppose we ought to do that.”

“Ought to? Why, we simply must. Every decent citizen owes it as a duty to give notice of crime when he discovers it, and to aid the officers of the law in stopping it. Civilized life would come to an end if men generally refused to support the authorities in their efforts to enforce the law. We’ve discovered a den of thieves, engaged in robbing the Government—that is to say, robbing all of us. So we’ll get away from here just as early in the morning as we can. Now let’s get some sleep.”

It was easy to say, “Let’s get some sleep,” but not easy to get it in the excited condition of mind that had come upon every member of the little party. But, by keeping silence and lying still, the weary fellows did manage to sleep a little after awhile, and it was the sun shining full in their faces that at last aroused them to a busy day.