What Happened at Quasi: The Story of a Carolina Cruise

“You’re quite right, Cal,” answered Dick; “it would be a shame to have our jolly outing spoiled. As for supplies, I suppose we might run down to Bluffton and pick up the absolutely necessary things – ”

“Yes, or we can do without them,” interposed Tom, to whom every hour of their sporting trip seemed a precious thing not to be lost on any account.

“Oh, yes, we could get them by going a little out of our way,” said Cal, “or we could go without. I spent two or three months alone down among these woods and waters without such things, and I can’t remember that I was the worse for it – though I confess my breeches and my shirt and shoes suffered. Anyhow, Larry is our captain this time, and he must decide. He hasn’t spoken a word yet.”

“It has not seemed necessary,” Larry answered. “Of course we shall go to Beaufort just as fast as we can.”

“But why, Larry?” asked Tom.

“Simply because it is our duty.”

“But why can’t we wait till we’re on our way back?”

“It would be too late then.”

“But I say, Larry,” interposed Dick, “do you really think we are under so imperative an obligation as that?”

“To do one’s duty is always an imperative obligation. We are all of us the sons of gentlemen. We have been trained to think – and truly so – that a gentleman must do his duty regardless of consequences to himself. So we are going to start for Beaufort at daylight, no matter what annoyances it may bring upon us.”

“Of course you are right,” said Dick and Tom in a breath. Cal said nothing until one of them asked him why he remained silent.

“I’m a Rutledge,” he answered, “and what Larry has said is the gospel in which I have been bred. I hadn’t thought it out till Larry spoke, that’s all.”

“Neither had I,” said Dick.

“Nor I,” said Tom. “Of course we’ve all been bred in the same creed, and I for one shall never again wait to be reminded of it when a duty presents itself.”

“Your decision is unanimously sustained and approved, Larry,” added Dick, by way of relaxing the seriousness of the talk. “The Rutledges, the Garnetts and the Wentworths echo your thought, if not your words – for Echo insists upon pronouncing them – ‘Bully for you!’”

At that moment something happened which brought all four of the boys to their feet and prompted Cal to slip the cartridges out of his gun and substitute others carrying buckshot in their stead. The others, observing his act, quickly imitated it.

XVIII

FIGHT OR FAIR PLAY

As the exchange of cartridges was in progress, five men, all armed, approached the bivouac. They had landed from a boat a hundred yards or so further down the creek, and attempted to creep upon the camp and take it by surprise.

Fortunately Larry’s quick ears had caught sound of them, and by the time the exchange of bird for buckshot was completed they were in plain view and not more than a dozen or twenty yards away.

“Halt!” Larry cried out to them, and as they seemed indisposed to obey the command, he called again:

“Stand where you are or we’ll shoot!”

There was no doubt in Larry’s mind that these men were a band of smugglers, or that they were trying to spring upon his party unawares. He had no mind to be taken by surprise by murderous ruffians. Fortunately for all concerned, his command was obeyed.

“Who are you and what do you want?”

“That we decline to say,” said the spokesman of the party.

“Then stand off,” said Larry, “or go back to your own place, wherever it is, or take the consequences.”

Larry was quick to observe that neither the words nor the tone of the one who had spoken were such as the drunken, degraded, ignorant men he had seen in the smugglers’ camp would have used, and the fact puzzled him. After a moment’s reflection he called out:

“If you have any business with us you may come ahead a few paces into the full light of the fire and say what you have to say. But if one of you raises a gun we’ll give you a volley of buckshot straight at your breasts. Come on out of the bushes and tell us what you want.”

As the advance was made and the full firelight fell upon the five men, Larry saw that they were in the uniform of the revenue cutter service, with which he was familiar.

“I beg your pardon, Boatswain,” he said, but without relaxing his watchfulness; “I couldn’t see your uniforms until now, and mistook your party for one of a very different sort. Come to the fire and tell us what you want; your men can stay where they are till we understand each other better.”

This last was said because of an apparent purpose on the part of the men to move forward in a body.

“Now then, Boatswain, what have you to say to us?” Larry asked, while the other three boys stood watchfully by the huge trunk of the fallen tree with their shotguns held precisely as they would have been had their owners been alertly waiting for a pointer to flush a flock of birds for them to shoot on the wing.

“We are men in the revenue service,” the boatswain answered. “We were sent ashore from the cutter that lies just off the mouth of the creek to ask who you are and what you are doing here – in short, to give an account of yourselves. It will save trouble if you answer us.”

“Coming from an agent of the revenue,” answered Larry, with dignity, “your questions are entirely proper. It was not necessary to couple an implied threat with them. However, that was nothing worse than a bit of ill manners, and I’ll overlook it. To answer your questions: My name is Lawrence Rutledge; one of the others is my brother. We live in Charleston, and with our two guests we are down here for a little sporting trip. Is there anything else you’d like to know about us?”

“That’s a queer sort of boat you’ve got,” answered the other.

“I asked if there was anything else you wanted to know,” said Larry, ignoring the comment on the dory’s appearance as an impertinent one.

“I guess you’ll have to talk with the lieutenant about that. You see I’m only a warrant officer.”

“Very well. Where is he?”

“On board the cutter.”

“Send for him then. We’ll give him any information we can.”

“I think I see myself sending for him! I’ll have to take you on board.”

“But we won’t go,” answered Larry, with eyes snapping.

“You’ll have to go.”

“But we won’t. We are American citizens, attending to our honest business. If your lieutenant or any other officer of the Government wishes to ask us any legitimate question, we’re ready to answer. But we will not endure insult or wrong. If you have a warrant for our arrest we’ll not resist, but we’ll not submit to arrest without authority.”

“We don’t have to bother about warrants when we’ve got smugglers dead to rights.”

“But we are not smugglers.”

“That’s for you to settle with the lieutenant. It’s my business to arrest all of you and take you on board the cutter.”

In a low voice, before the boatswain had finished his sentence, Larry said to his comrades:

“Jump over the log – we’ll make a breastwork of it,” and instantly they obeyed, leaving him on the side next the revenue men. Then to the boatswain he said:

“You’ve no right to arrest without a warrant. I tell you once for all we’ll not submit to arrest.”

“What’ll you do then?”

“We’ll fight first,” answered Larry, delivering the words like shots from a pistol, and leaping to the farther side of the fallen tree as he spoke.

The boatswain was bewildered. He knew, in a vague way, that no one can legally make an arrest without a warrant, except when he sees a person in the act of committing crime or running away from officers; but he had never before had an experience of determined resistance. He was accustomed to the summary ways of brute force that prevail in military life, and to him it seemed absurd for anybody to resist the only kind of constituted authority with which he was familiar.

He was sorely perplexed. He was by no means sure that the boys were the smugglers he had been sent to arrest. On the contrary, their manner, their speech and all other appearances were in their favor. Nevertheless his superior officers had been watching the dory’s movements for several days and had sent him ashore in full assurance that they had their quarry at bay. He was convinced that he ought to arrest the party, but he had only four men and himself for the work, and there stood four stalwart young fellows behind the fallen tree trunk with four double-barreled shotguns bristling across the barrier. The creek, with a sharp bend, lay upon their left and completely covered their rear, while on their right was a swamp so densely grown up in cane and entangled vines, to say nothing of the treacherous mud below, that passage across it would have been nearly impossible in the broadest light of day. Clearly Larry’s party must be assailed in front if assailed at all, and the boatswain was not to blame for hesitating to make an assault which would almost certainly cost the lives of himself and all his men. Add to this his uncertainty as to his right to make any assault at all, and what he did is easily understood.

He ordered his men to fall back to their boat, and as they did so he stood alone where he had been. When the men were well away, he said to Larry:

“You don’t think me a coward, do you?”

“Certainly not,” Larry answered.

“Well, this thing may get me into trouble you know, and if you’re the man you say you are, I may want you to help me out as a witness. Will you do it?”

“Yes, certainly. But what’s the use of getting into trouble? I’m willing to trust your word as an honorable fellow; if you’ll trust mine in the same way you and I can settle this whole matter in ten minutes in a way that will bring you praise instead of blame. Don’t go aboard the cutter and report a failure and be blamed for it; stay here and talk the matter over and then go aboard with a report that will do you honor. What do you say to that?”

“What are your terms?”

“Only that you meet me in the same spirit in which I meet you. Give up your notion that we are a gang of smugglers – you must see how absurd it is – and give up your claim of a right to arrest us without a warrant; meet me half way and I’ll show you how to get out of a scrape that you wouldn’t have got into but for those two mistaken guesses. We have no feeling of enmity toward you and no wish to injure you. If we were ready to fight you to the death, it was only in defense of our rights. Give up your attempt to invade those rights and there will be no quarrel between us. Is it a bargain?”

“Well, you speak fair anyhow. I don’t see what else I can do than meet you half way. I’m ready.”

“Very well, then,” said Larry, emptying his gun of its cartridges and signing to his comrades to do likewise. “As you have sent your men away, we’ll make things even by disarming ourselves.”

With instinctive recognition of the manly generosity thus shown the boatswain tossed his own gun to the ground and, advancing, held out his hand, saying:

“You wouldn’t have done that if you hadn’t been what you say you are. I’m ready to sit down now and talk things over.”

Larry sprang over the log that separated them and took the proffered hand. Then all sat down, and Larry said:

“I’m willing to tell you now what I never would have told you under a threat. We have seen the smugglers you are looking for; we know where they are, or at any rate where they were two days ago; we know where their plunder is hidden, and we are prepared to go with you to the place. We were on our way to Beaufort to report all this to the revenue authorities when you came to arrest us.”

The two had risen and were standing now, and the boatswain was continually shaking Larry’s hand. He tried to say what was in his mind but couldn’t. His wits were bewildered for the moment, and Larry came to their rescue.

“Pull yourself together, Boatswain,” he said, “and listen to me. Hurry back to your boat, go aboard the cutter at once, and report that you haven’t found a smuggler’s camp but that you’ve found somebody who can and will show your commanding officer where one is. Tell him Lawrence Rutledge and his companions offer their services as guides who know where to go. Be off, quick. We’ll wait here for his answer.”

The boatswain’s wits were all in his control now and he hurried away. He had achieved victory where only defeat had seemed possible. He had met with success where a few minutes before he had hoped for nothing better than failure. He was going on board to receive commendation instead of the censure he had expected. Honor was his in lieu of dreaded disgrace.

XIX

WHY LARRY WAS READY FOR BATTLE

“Larry, you ought to be a major-general,” said Dick, with enthusiasm, as soon as the boatswain was well out of earshot. “I never saw anything better managed than that was. From the moment you put us behind the log, the fight – if there was to be a fight – was all ours.”

“Yes,” said Tom, “we’d have had no difficulty in cleaning those fellows out if it had come to that, and the boatswain saw it as clearly as we did. But I don’t yet understand why you did it, Larry.”

“Why, simply to make sure of success in self-defense. That seems simple enough,” responded Larry.

“Oh, yes, that’s simple enough, but I wasn’t thinking about that. I meant I don’t see why you made any objection to going aboard at first and telling the officers there all you’re going to tell them now. You are going of your own accord now; why didn’t you go when he wanted you to?”

“Because there was a principle at stake,” answered Larry, setting his teeth together as he recalled the controversy. “We are going aboard now of our own accord, as you say. That’s very different from going aboard as prisoners, under compulsion.”

“But I don’t see what difference it would have made when you knew the officers there would make guests instead of prisoners of us as soon as they heard what you had to say. It seems to me it would have come to the same thing in the end.”

“Not by a long shot,” answered Larry, speaking with particular earnestness. “Think a minute, Tom. We are free men, living under a free government that exists for the express purpose of securing liberty to all its people and protecting them in the enjoyment of that liberty. If one man, or one set of men, could arrest others without a warrant from a court, there would be no security for liberty and no liberty in fact. Whenever the people of any country are ready to submit to any infringement of their rights as free men, liberty in that country is dead, and tyranny is free to work its evil will. And in a free country it is the most sacred duty of every man to resist the smallest as well as the largest trespass upon his rights as a man. Usually he can do this by appealing to the courts of law, but in a case like ours to-night, where there is no possibility of making such an appeal, every man must be ready to fight for his rights – yes, to fight to the death for them if necessary.”

“But the matter was so small in this case – ”

“What possible difference does that make? A principle is never small; liberty is always of supreme consequence, and it makes no difference how trifling the trespass upon one’s liberty is in itself, the duty to resist it at all costs and all hazards is just the same. Convenience and comfort do not count in any way. The difficulty is that men are not always ready to take trouble and endure inconvenience in defense of their rights where the matter in question seems to them of small moment. They forget that ‘eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,’ or if they remember it, they are too self-indulgent to undertake a troublesome resistance. It was not so that the men of the Revolutionary time looked at the matter. Webster said that the Americans ‘went to war against a preamble,’ and perhaps they did, but the preamble involved a fundamental principle. It was for the principle, not for the preamble, that they fought for seven long years. The colonists could easily have submitted to the impositions of a half crazy king and his tyrannical prime minister. It would have saved them a vast deal of inconvenience, expense and danger to do so. It would have been far more comfortable for them if they had done so. But if they had, this great, free nation of ours would never have existed, and the people in other civilized countries would not have enjoyed anything like the liberty they do now. In the same way it would have saved a lot of trouble if we had let those people arrest us to-night, but we had no right to submit to that. It was our duty to stand upon our rights and defend the principle by defending them.

“There! The lecture is over, and I promise not to let it happen again,” said Larry, by way of indirect apology for his seriousness.

“Well,” said Tom, “I for one am glad I heard the lecture as you call it. I needed it badly, for I had never thought of these things in that way. How did you come to have all that on the tip of your tongue, Larry?”

“I don’t know, or, yes I do. I was born and brought up on that gospel, and I have heard it preached all my life. My father has taught Cal and me from childhood that ‘the only legitimate function of government is to maintain the conditions of liberty,’ and that the highest duty of every citizen is to insist that the government under which he lives shall do precisely that. Now let’s talk of something else, or you fellows talk, rather, for I’ve talked more than my share already.”

“Before we do,” broke in Dick, “there’s just one thing I’d like to ask.”

“All right. Go ahead. Ask anything you please if it isn’t a conundrum.”

“Well, it isn’t a conundrum. It is only that I wonder how you know there isn’t some law authorizing the revenue officers to make arrests without warrants?”

“I know it simply because such a law is impossible.”

“How so?”

“Because there is no power on earth that can make such a law for this country.”

“Couldn’t Congress make it?”

“No. Congress has no more power to make it than a flock of crows has.”

“I don’t understand. If Congress should pass an act to that effect and the President should sign it, what then?”

“What then? Why just nothing at all. It wouldn’t be a law. It would have no more force or effect than the decree of a company of lunatics that the sun shall hereafter rise in the west and set in the east.”

“But why not?”

“Why, simply because Congress has no power to make any law that violates the Constitution. The Constitution expressly secures certain rights to every citizen. If Congress passes an act in violation of the Constitution, or even an act that the Constitution does not authorize it to pass, the courts refuse to enforce it or in any way to recognize it as a law. Now we’ve simply got to stop all this discussion, for I hear the revenue officers coming.”

XX

ABOARD THE CUTTER

When the boatswain made his report to the lieutenant on board he did not confine himself to the points Larry had suggested. It had been his first thought to do so, reporting only that he had found no smugglers but had discovered a law-abiding company of youths who knew where the smugglers were and were willing to act as guides to the point indicated.

But on his way it occurred to him that the lieutenant might ask him questions – how he knew the character of the boys, and why he had not placed them under arrest, and other things relating to the conduct of his expedition.

It would be humiliating to have the story thus drawn out of him, and it would be awkward for him to explain why he had not reported the whole thing in the first place. So, upon reflection, he told the story in full, though briefly.

When he mentioned Larry’s name the lieutenant gave a little start and leaning forward as if to make sure he heard aright, asked:

“What did you say his name is?”

“Lawrence Rutledge is the name he gave me, sir.”

“Of Charleston?”

“That’s where he said he lived, sir,” answered the boatswain, wondering why his superior was so closely questioning him on these points.

The lieutenant resumed his upright position and with a half laugh said:

“It’s lucky for you that you chose discretion as the better part of valor this time. If Lawrence Rutledge is any way akin to his father, you’d have had the tidiest little fight you ever heard of on your hands if you’d charged him.”

“I don’t think there would have been any fight at all, sir, if you’ll pardon me.”

“Why not?”

“Only that I think every man of us would have bitten dust before we could have fired a gun. Those fellows were ready with guns cocked and leveled.”

“The moral of that is that you too should always be ready and have your men ready. Order the gig alongside – men unarmed.”

When the gig was ready, which was almost instantly, the lieutenant ran down the ladder, dropped into her, took the helm, and gave the orders:

“Oars!” “Let fall!” “Give way!” and the boat shot away toward the plainly visible camp-fire.

Landing, he introduced himself to Larry, who received him cordially and in turn presented his comrades.

“I have the pleasure of knowing your father very well, Mr. Rutledge,” he began.

“Then, please,” Larry interrupted, “call me ‘Lawrence,’ or ‘Larry,’ and not ‘Mr. Rutledge,’ Lieutenant. I’m only a boy yet, and I’ll never be ‘Mister’ to any of my father’s friends.”

“Very well. ‘Larry’ it shall be then, the more gladly because that is what I called you years ago when, as I remember, I was telling a lot of sea stories to you and your brother Calhoun – ”

“Make it Cal, Lieutenant,” said the youth mentioned. “Larry and I are twins, you know, and always share things evenly between us. We did so with your stories, you know. I remember it very well, though we were a pair of very small youngsters then.”

“So you were – so young that I didn’t think you would remember the matter. But we’re losing time, and time may be precious in this case. My petty officer tells me you young gentlemen have seen the miscreants I’ve been hunting for and can tell me where they are.”

“We’ve seen them, and our friend Tom Garnett here has been inside one of their caches and inspected their goods. We can tell you where they were two nights or so ago, and perhaps they are there yet.”

“Almost certainly they are,” broke in the lieutenant. “It is calm weather outside, and not a craft of any kind has put in here under plea of weather stress since the Senorita sailed two or three days ago.”

“The Senorita?” Tom repeated; “why, that’s the ship’s name I saw marked on some of the cigar cases and rum kegs they had.”

“Good, good, good!” said the officer enthusiastically. “If we can get to that hiding place before they remove the goods, I’ll telegraph to Baltimore to nab the ship also when she comes in. We must get there in time. My officer understood that you and your party were willing to go with us. Was his understanding correct?”

“Yes,” Larry answered, “we’ll be glad to do that, but we must make some provision for the safety of our boat while we are gone.”

“She’ll be safe enough when she rests on the cutter’s deck. I’ll send a crew to take her alongside and we’ll hoist her on board. When all’s over I’ll put you in the water again at any point you choose. Is that satisfactory?”

“I should say so,” answered Larry. “We’re ready, Lieutenant.”

“Come on then, and I’ll take you aboard. I’ll leave a man with your craft till a boat’s crew can come and tow her alongside. Then we’ll weigh anchor and be off.”

It was less than fifteen minutes later when the boys saw the Hunkydory carefully braced upon the little steamer’s deck and closely covered with a tarpaulin.

But it was nearly midnight and the lieutenant invited the boys to sleep in the comfortable berths provided for them until the cutter should reach the neighborhood of the smugglers’ camp. He thought he sufficiently recognized the locality from Cal’s description, and probably he could have steamed to it without further guidance. But there was no sleep in the eyes of the boys after their adventurous night, and they all heartily echoed Cal’s sentiment when he answered:

“What good is there in the frazzled end of a ragged night for sleeping purposes. I for one will stay up till we see this thing through, if it is going through to-night.”

The little cutter was a fleet-winged craft, built for speed, and carrying greatly more horse power than ordinary steamers of twice her size. Her navigator and all her officers, indeed, knew every detail of the waters they were traversing, and so the lieutenant hoped that he might reach his destination in time to descend upon the smugglers before morning.