The Rival Campers Afloat: or, The Prize Yacht Viking

The Rival Campers Afloat; or, The Prize Yacht Viking

CHAPTER I.

DOWN THE RIVER

It was a pleasant afternoon in the early part of the month of June. The Samoset River, winding down prettily through hills and sloping farm lands to the bay of the same name, gleamed in the sunlight, now with a polished surface like ebony in some sheltered inlet, or again sparkling with innumerable points of light where its surface was whipped up into tiny waves by a brisk moving wind.

There had been rain for a few days before, and the weather was now clearing, with a smart westerly breeze that had come up in the morning, but was swinging in slightly to the southward. The great white cloud-banks had mostly passed on, and these were succeeded at present by swiftly moving clumps of smaller and lighter clouds, that drifted easily across the sky, like the sails below them over the surface of the water.

There were not a few of these sails upon the river, some set to the breeze and some furled; some of the craft going up with the tide toward the distant city of Benton, the head of vessel navigation; some breasting the tide and working their way down toward Samoset Bay; other and larger craft, with sails snugly furled, tagging along sluggishly at the heels of blustering little tugs, – each evidently much impressed with the importance of its mission, – and so going on and out to the open sea, where they would sail down the coast with their own great wings spread.

The river was, indeed, a picture of life and animation. It was a river with work to do, but it did it cheerfully and with a good spirit. Far up above the city of Benton, it had brought the great log rafts down through miles of forest and farm land. Above and below the city, for miles, it had run bravely through sluice and mill-race, and turned the great wheels for the mills that sawed the forest stuff into lumber. And now, freed from all bounds and the restraint of dams and sluiceways, and no longer choked with its burden of logs, it was pleased to float the ships, loaded deep with the sawed lumber, down and away to other cities.

There was many a craft going down the river that afternoon. Here and there along the way was a big three or four masted schooner, loaded with ice or lumber, and bound for Baltimore or Savannah. Or, it might be, one would take notice of a trim Italian bark, carrying box-shooks, to be converted later into boxes for lemons and oranges. Then, farther southward, a schooner that had brought its catch to the Benton market, and was now working out again to the fishing-grounds among the islands of the bay.

Less frequently plied the river steamers that ran to and from the summer resorts in Samoset Bay; or, once a day, coming or going, the larger steamers that ran between Benton and Boston.

Amid all these, at a point some twenty miles down the river from Benton, there sailed a craft that was, clearly, not of this busy, hard-working fraternity of ships. It was a handsome little vessel, of nearly forty feet length, very shapely of hull and shining of spars; with a glint of brass-work here and there; its clean, white sides presenting a polished surface to the sunbeams; its rigging new and well set up, and a handsome new pennant flung to the breeze from its topmast.

The captain of many a coaster eyed her sharply as she passed; and, now and then, one would let his own vessel veer half a point off its course, while he took his pipe from his mouth and remarked, “There’s a clean craft. Looks like she might go some.” And then, probably, as he brought his own vessel back to its course, concluded with the usual salt-water man’s comment, “Amateur sailors, I reckon. Humph!”

That remark, if made on this particular occasion, would have been apparently justifiable. If one might judge by their age, the skippers of this trim yacht should certainly have been classed as amateurs. There were two of them. The larger, a youth of about sixteen or seventeen years of age, held the wheel and tended the main-sheet. The other, evidently a year or two younger, sat ready to tend the jib-sheets on either side as they tacked, shifting his seat accordingly. The yacht was beating down the river against the last of a flood-tide.

“We’re doing finely, Henry,” said the elder boy, as he glanced admiringly at the set of the mainsail, and then made a general proud survey of the craft from stem to stern and from cabin to topmast. “She does walk along like a lady and no mistake. She beats the Surprise– poor old boat! My, but I often think of that good little yacht I owned, sunk down there in the thoroughfare. We had lots of fun in her. But this one certainly more than takes her place.”

“Who would ever have thought,” he continued, “when we saw the strange men sail into the harbour last year, with this yacht, that she would turn out to be a stolen craft, and that she would one day be put up for sale, and that old Mrs. Newcome would buy her for us? It’s like a story in a book.”

“It’s better than any story I ever read, Jack,” responded the other boy. “It’s a story with a stroke of luck at the end of it – and that’s better than some of them turn out. But say, don’t you think you better let me take my trick at the wheel? You know you are going to teach me how to sail her. I don’t expect to make much of a fist of it, at the start; but I’ve picked up quite a little bit of yacht seamanship from my sailing with the Warren boys.”

“That’s so,” conceded the other. “You must have got a pretty good notion of how to sail a boat, by watching them. Here, take the wheel. But you’ll find that practice in real sailing, and just having it in your head from watching others, are two different things. However, you’ll learn fast. I never knew any one who had any sort of courage, and any natural liking toward boat-sailing, but what he could pick it up fast, if he kept his eyes open.

“The first thing to do, to learn to sail a boat, is to take hold in moderate weather and work her yourself. And the next thing, is to talk to the fishermen and the yachtsmen, and listen when they get to spinning yarns and arguing. You can get a lot of information in that way that you can use, yourself, later on.”

The younger boy took the wheel, while the other sat up alongside, directing his movements. But first he took the main-sheet and threw off several turns, where he had had it belayed on the cleat back of the wheel, and fastened it merely with a slip-knot, that could be loosed with a single smart pull on the free end.

“We won’t sail with the sheet fast until you have had a few weeks at it, Henry,” he said. “There are more boats upset from sheets fast at the wrong time, or from main-sheets with kinks in them, that won’t run free when a squall hits, than from almost any other cause. And the river is a lot worse in that way than the open bay, for the flaws come quicker and sharper off these high banks.”

Henry Bums, with the wheel in hand and an eye to the luff of the sail, as of one not wholly inexperienced, made no reply to the other’s somewhat patronizing manner; but a quiet smile played about the corners of his mouth. If he had any notion that the other’s extreme care was not altogether needed, he betrayed no sign of impatience, but took it in good part. Perhaps he realized that common failing of every yachtsman, to think that there is nobody else in all the world that can sail a boat quite as well as himself.

He knew, too, that Jack Harvey had, indeed, had by far a larger experience in sailing than he, though he had spent much of his time upon the water.

In any event, his handling of the boat now evidently satisfied the critical watchfulness of Jack Harvey; for that youth presently exclaimed, “That’s it. Oh, you are going to make a skipper, all right. You take hold with confidence, too, and that’s a good part of the trick.”

At this point in their sailing, however, the yacht Viking seemed to have attracted somewhat more than the casual attention of an observer from shore. A little less than a quarter of a mile down the river, on a wharf that jutted some distance out from the bank, so that the river as it ran swerved swiftly by its spiling, a man stood waving to them.

“Hello,” said Henry Burns, espying the figure on the wharf, “there’s a tribute to the beauty of the Viking. Somebody probably thinks this is the president’s yacht and is saluting us.”

“Well, he means us, sure enough,” replied Jack Harvey, “and no joke, either. He’s really waving. He wants to hail us.”

The man had his hat in hand and was, indeed, waving it to them vigorously.

They had been standing across the river in an opposite direction to the wharf; but now, as Jack Harvey cast off the leeward jib-sheets, Henry Burns put the helm over, and the yacht swung gracefully and swiftly up into the wind and headed off on the tack inshore. Jack Harvey let the jibs flutter for a moment, until the yacht had come about, and Henry Burns had begun to check her from falling off the wind, by reversing the wheel. Then he quickly trimmed in on the sheets, and the jibs began to draw.

“Most beginners,” he said, “trim the jib in flat on the other side the minute they cast off the leeward sheet. But that delays her in coming about.”

Again the quiet smile on the face of Henry Burns, but he merely answered, “That’s so.”

They stood down abreast the wharf and brought her up, with sails fluttering. Jack Harvey, looking up from the side to the figure above on the wharf, called out, “Hello, were you waving to us?”

“Why, yes,” responded the man, “I was. Are you going down the river far?”

“Bound down to Southport,” said Harvey.

“Good!” exclaimed the stranger, and added, confidently, “I’ll go along with you part way, if you don’t mind. I’m on my way to Burton’s Landing, five miles below, and the steamboat doesn’t come along for three hours yet. I cannot get a carriage and I don’t want to walk. You don’t mind giving me a lift, do you? That’s a beautiful boat of yours, by the way.”

The man had an air of easy assurance; and, besides, the request was one that any yachtsman would willingly grant.

“Why, certainly,” replied Harvey, “we’ll take you, eh, Henry?”

“Pleased to do it,” responded Henry Burns.

They worked the yacht up alongside the wharf, and the stranger, grasping a stay, swung himself off and leaped down on to the deck. Then he pushed the boat’s head off with a vigorous shove and advanced, smilingly, with hand extended, to greet the boys. The Viking gathered headway and was once more going down-stream.

The stranger was a rather tall, well-built man, light on his feet, and handled himself as though he were no novice aboard a boat. He descended into the cockpit and shook hands with Jack Harvey and Henry Burns.

His voice, as he bade them good afternoon, was singularly full and deep, and seemed to issue almost oddly from behind a heavy, blond moustache. As Henry Burns expressed it afterward, it reminded him of a ventriloquist he had seen once with a travelling show, because the man’s lips seemed hardly to move, and the muscles of his face scarcely changed as he spoke. His eyes, of a clear but cold blue, lighted up, however, in a pleasant way, as he thanked them.

He wore a suit of navy blue, and a yachting-cap on his head.

“This is the greatest luck in the world for me,” he said. “You see, I want to catch the train that will take me down to Bellport, and I can get it at the Landing below. This fine craft of yours will take me – ”

He stopped with strange abruptness. If the attention of Jack Harvey and Henry Burns had, by chance, been directed more closely to him, and less upon the handling of their yacht, they might have observed a surprised and puzzled look come over his face. They might have observed him half-start up from his seat, like a man that had suddenly come, all unwittingly, upon a thing he had not expected to see.

But the two boys, intent upon their sailing, noticed only that the man had left a sentence half-finished. They turned upon him inquiringly.

“What were you going to say?” asked Henry Burns.

The man settled back in his seat, reached a hand calmly into an inner coat-pocket, and drew forth a cigar-case.

“I dare say you don’t smoke,” he said, offering it to them. “No, well, I didn’t think so. You’re a little bit young for that. Let me see, what was I saying? – oh, yes, I was about to remark that this boat would take me down to the Landing on time. She does walk along prettily, and no mistake.”

With which, he lighted the cigar and began puffing enjoyably. But his eyes darted here and there, quickly, sharply, over the boat. Through a cloud of cigar smoke, he was scrutinizing it from one end to the other.

“You handle her well,” he said. “Had her long?”

“Why, no,” replied Harvey. “The fact is, though we have had other boats – that is, I have – and we have handled others, this is our first sail in this one. You see, we got her in an odd way, last season – just at the close of the season, in fact; and she was not in shape for sailing then. So we had to lay her up for the winter. This is really the first trying out we have given her.”

“Indeed, most interesting,” replied the stranger, arising from his seat and advancing toward the cabin bulkhead, where he stood, apparently gazing off across the river. Then, as he returned to his seat again, he added, “That’s rather an elaborate ornamenting of brass around the companionway.”

“Isn’t it, though!” exclaimed Harvey, proudly. “You don’t see them much handsomer than that often, eh?”

“Why, no, now you speak of it,” replied the man. “You don’t, and that’s a fact.

“In fact,” he added, stealing a sidelong glance at the two boys, “it’s the only one just like it that I ever saw.

“Pretty shore along here, isn’t it?” he remarked a few moments later, as they stood in near to where the spruces came down close to the water’s edge, with the ledges showing below. “What’s that you were saying about coming by the boat oddly? She looks to me as though your folks must have paid a good price for her.”

“Why, that’s the odd part of it,” answered Harvey. “The fact is, our folks didn’t pay for her at all. An old lady bought her for us. Made us a present of her. Perhaps you’d like to hear about it.”

“Indeed I should,” replied the stranger. “It will while away the time to the Landing.”

“You tell it, Henry,” said Harvey.

So Henry Burns began, while the stranger stretched his legs out comfortably and listened.

“Well,” said Henry Burns, “this yacht, the Viking, was named the Eagle when we first saw her.”

The stranger’s cigar was almost blazing with the vigour of his smoking.

“She came into the harbour of Southport – that’s on Grand Island, below here, where we are bound – one day last summer, to pick up a guest at the hotel. There were two men aboard her, and it turned out that these two men, and the man they were after at the hotel, had committed a robbery at Benton. That’s way up the river.

“Well, it’s a long story how they were discovered; but they were, and some jewels they had hidden were recovered. I said they were captured – but one, a man named Chambers, got away in this very yacht. But he came back, later, and set fire to the hotel for revenge.

“That was along toward the end of the summer. Then it happened that Jack, here, – Jack Harvey, – captured the man, Chambers, in this yacht, down in a thoroughfare below Grand Island. Jack’s boat, the Surprise, was sunk there, when the two yachts crashed together, bow on.”

“Poor old Surprise!” interrupted Jack Harvey.

“Well, then,” continued Henry Burns, “there is a man over at Southport, Squire Brackett, that hates all us boys, just because he is mean. He told Witham, the hotel proprietor, that he had seen us boys in the hotel basement, shortly before the fire; and he and Witham had us accused of setting it, although everybody in Southport was indignant about it. And all this time, Jack was on the right track, because he had seen the man running from the fire and had followed him over to the other shore of the island, and recognized the boat he sailed away in.

“So Jack sailed down the other side of the island, and captured the man, Chambers, in the thoroughfare; that is, Jack and his crew did. And they brought Chambers back just at the right time – and Squire Brackett and Witham were so ashamed they wanted to go and hide away somewhere.”

The man they had taken aboard looked smilingly at Henry Burns.

“That is certainly a remarkable story,” he said, knocking the ashes carelessly from the end of his cigar.

“Yes, but the rest of it is the oddest part of it,” responded Henry Burns. “There was an old lady named Mrs. Newcome, whose life we saved at the fire. She was furious at the squire and Witham for blaming us, and thankful enough when Jack got us out of it.

“Now, when Chambers was tried, he was so bitter against the other two who had got him into trouble, he confessed the yacht did not belong to any one of them. So the yacht was taken over by the sheriff, and advertisements were sent out all around to try to find the rightful owner. But they never did find him, and finally the yacht was condemned and put up for sale. There is where old Mrs. Newcome came in. She has no end of money, and no one to spend it on except herself and a cat. The yacht went cheap, and what did she do but buy it in and give it to us.”

Henry Burns paused, and there was silence for a few moments aboard the Viking. The stranger smoked without speaking, apparently lost in his own thoughts.

“That’s all of the yarn,” said Henry Burns, at length.

The man started to his feet, tossed his cigar away, and walked forward, with his hands in his pockets.

“That’s one of the oddest stories I ever heard,” he said. “You’re lucky chaps, aren’t you? Sounds like some novels I’ve read. By the way, isn’t that Burton’s Landing just ahead there?”

He seemed eager to get ashore.

“Yes, that is the Landing,” answered Harvey.

A few moments more and they were up to it, and the stranger was stepping ashore upon the pier.

“Well,” he said, shaking hands with them again, “I’m much obliged to both of you – really more than I can begin to tell you. Perhaps I can return the favour some day. My name is Charles Carleton. Live around at hotels pretty much, but spend most of my time in Boston. Hope I meet you again some day. Perhaps I may be down this way later, down the bay somewhere, if I like the looks of it, and the hotels. Good day.”

“Good day; you’re very welcome,” called out Henry Burns and Jack Harvey.

Again the yacht swung out into the river, gathering headway quickly and skimming along, heeling very gently.

The strange man stood watching her from the pier.

“No,” he said, softly, to himself, “I never saw but one boat just like her before. But who would have thought I should run across them the first thing? That was a stroke of luck.”

CHAPTER II.

THE COLLISION

“Pleasant sort of a man, wasn’t he?” commented Harvey, as the Viking left the pier astern, and the stranger could be seen walking briskly up the road toward the town.

“Why, yes, he was, in a way,” responded Henry Burns. “Most persons manage to make themselves agreeable while one is doing them a favour. Really, though, he isn’t one of the open, hearty kind, though he did try to be pleasant. I don’t know why I think so, but he seemed sort of half-concealed behind that big moustache.”

Harvey laughed.

“That’s a funny notion,” he said.

“Well,” responded Henry Burns, “of course it wasn’t just that. But, at any rate, he is the kind of a man that has his own way about things. Did you notice, he didn’t exactly ask us to take him into the boat. He said, right out at the start, that he was going along with us – of course, if we were willing. But he was bound to come aboard, just the same, whether we were willing or not.”

“Hm!” said Harvey. “You do take notice of things, don’t you? I didn’t pay any attention to what he said; but, now I think of it, he did have that sort of way. However, we shall probably never set eyes on him again, so what’s the odds?”

They were getting down near to the mouth of the river now, and already, a mile ahead, the bay broadened out before their eyes.

The wind was blowing brisk, almost from the south by this time, and the first of the ebb-tide running down against it caused a meeting between the two that was not peaceful. At the point where river and bay blended, and for some distance back up the river, there was a heavy chop-sea tumbling and breaking in short, foam-capped waves. Farther out in the bay there was considerable of a sea running.

Harvey, lounging lazily on the seat opposite Henry Burns, suddenly sprang up and uttered an exclamation of surprise. Then he pointed on far ahead, over the port bow, to a tiny object that bobbed in the troubled waters of the river, low lying and indistinct.

“What do you make of that, Henry?” he cried.

“Why, it looks like a log from one of the mills up above,” replied the other, after he had observed it with some difficulty. “Oh, no, it isn’t,” he exclaimed the next moment. “There is something alive on it – or in it. Say, you don’t suppose it can be Tom Harris and Bob White, do you? That is a canoe, I believe.”

Without waiting to reply, Jack Harvey dodged quickly down the companionway, and returned, a moment later, from the cabin, holding a spy-glass in one hand.

“Hooray! clap that to your eye, Henry,” he cried, when he had taken a hasty survey ahead with it.

“That’s it!” exclaimed Henry Burns, taking a long look through the glass, while Harvey assumed his place at the wheel. “There they are, two of them, paddling away for good old Southport as hard as ever they can. There are two boys, as I make them out. Yes, it’s Tom and Bob, sure as you live. Won’t it seem like old times, though, to overhaul them? You keep the wheel, Jack. We can’t catch up with them any too soon to suit me.”

“Shall we give them a salute?” cried Harvey.

“No, let’s sail up on them and give them a surprise,” suggested the other. “They know we own the boat, but they haven’t seen her under sail since we have had her. They may not recognize us.”

While the yacht Viking was parting the still moderate waves with its clean-cut bows, and laying a course that would bring it up with the canoe in less than a half-hour, the occupants of the tiny craft were bending hard to their paddles, pushing head on into the outer edge of the chop-sea. They were making good time, despite the sea and the head wind.

“There go a couple of them Indians from away up the river yonder,” sang out a man forward on a stubby, broad-bowed coaster to the man at the wheel, as the canoe passed a two-master beating across the river. The boys in the canoe chuckled.

“Guess we must be getting good and black, Bob,” said the boy who wielded the stern paddle to the other in the bow. “And our first week on the water, at that, for the season.”

“Yes, we’ve laid the first coat on pretty deep,” responded his companion, glancing with no little pride and satisfaction at a pair of brown and muscular arms and a pair of sunburned shoulders, revealed to good advantage by a blue, sleeveless jersey that looked as though it had seen more than one summer’s outing.

“What do you think of the bay, Tom?” he added, addressing the other boy. This youth, similarly clad and similarly bronzed and reddened, was handling his paddle like a practised steersman and was directing the canoe’s course straight down the bay, as though aiming fair at some point far away on an island that showed vaguely fifteen miles distant.

“Oh, it’s all right,” answered Tom. “It’s all right for this evening. Plenty of rough water from now until seven or eight o’clock to-night, but it’s just the usual sea that a southerly raises in the bay. We won’t get into any such scrape as we did last year, when we came down here, not knowing the bay nor the coast of Grand Island, and let a storm catch us and throw us out pell-mell on the shore. We’ll not give our friends, the Warren boys, another such a fright this year. We can get across all right – that is, if you don’t mind a bit of a splashing over the bows.”

“It won’t be the first time, – nor the last, for that matter, I reckon,” responded Bob.

“And I always get my share of it, in the end, too,” said the other boy; “because when it sprays aboard it runs down astern and I have to kneel in it. Well, on we go, then. It’s fifteen miles of rough water, but think how we’ll eat when we get there.”