Great Bear Island : a boy's story of adventure and discovery

XVI The Twenty-Footer

[vii]

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

XVII Out of the Labyrinth . . . 228

XVIII The Boom Once More . . . 240

XIX Down-River 250

XX Almost the Last 271

XXI The Last 285

[ viii ]

ILLUSTRATIONS

“You Wan’ One, Too?” He Asked. . Frontispiece

PAGE

“Camp — cots! Tents! Pots! Grub? Lots ! We’re

the Ancient Order of the “ Argue-nots ” ! 30

Another Hour and they were through the

Second Layer 95

Three of the Canoes were half filled with

the Panic-stricken already 155

Ninny was swimming like some Great Hunted

Sea -otter 167

Back into Safety 200

They cached those Priceless Mound Relics

in that Jungle of Cedars 215 v

“Somebody Seems to have left Something in

the Way” 248

[ix]

Chapter One

T was a warm, close evening in mid- July. In the “Club,” Bert, otherwise “Booky,” Gordon, sat hunched over that first of Smithsonian publications. Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley. From time to time he tenderly lifted an axehead, or rubbing stone, or a little dirtbrown pot from the cabinet beside him, and raptly compared it with one of the yellow old Squier woodcuts.

On the other side of the room Frank Emmett, more familiarly known as “Tools” because of his wholly remarkable ingenuity in using them, was putting varnish stain on a second set of cabinets. He had suspended them from the wall by a device that was one of his latest “little ideas.”

The Club had once been Doctor Gordon’s old driving shed. But since Christmas it had been lined with weather-felting and heated by a big box stove. It had been equipped with home-made “gym” mattresses, and furnished from the combined Gordon, Emmett, Tuttle, and Harrison attics and book-shelves. Those Indian relics that “Booky” was once more so fondly classifying came from that neverto-be-forgotten little island mound which the four had discovered on their expedition a hundred miles up the Wantebec River, the summer before. It was a small collection, but there was no other in town that compared with it. And, altogether, the Club was such a combination of gymnasium, library, and museum as should have lifted any four boys on earth to the supreme height of happiness.

It should have. But now, when they knew their river from Mill Bend to Lunge Lake, when they had learned exactly how [ 2 ]

to do things, when they felt in every yearning bone that if only they could get another chance at it they could find mounds and bring back treasure-trove worthy of a Smithsonian Report itself — such a second expedition was the one thing there seemed no prospect of their being able to make for the next five years. It was out of the question for Tools and Booky to go alone, and two weeks ago Bud Tuttle and Jack Harrison had begun their first summer’s work in the sugar-beet fields of South Falls.

In the beet fields, too, such days as the present must be simply one long ten hours of baking, sweltering glare. How much more longingly and thirstingly, therefore, would the minds of Bud and Jack go back to the cool woods and waters of the North — to the channel where they used to get the pickerel, to the camp where they had seen the lynx; above all, to the bush-grown little island where they had found that one small mound!

Booky put down the battered old volume, and again he sighed immeasurably: “Say! Say, Toolsy! ”

Tools sighed with him: “Yep, old man?”

“Say, imagine finding something like the Serpent Mound up there!”

“Or Fort Ancient! And, jimmy-o, one night last week I dreamed the four of us had got up there again somehow, and we’d located a mound that you could put a whole town on top of ! ”

“Gosh, did you! And, say, I’ve been dreaming about Ninny Noggins again.”

“Me, too. I did last week. I guess it’s because they’ve been putting that stuff about him in the Herald all the time.”

For more than a year Ninny Noggins had been better known as the “wild man.” But, three years before, no one had guessed that he was ever to be called by such a name. He had been simply Ninny, the big, shiftless, crazy-witted but always goodnatured squatter on Hunter’s Point. The [ 4 ]

cruel stupidity that had accused him of starting the great fire of 1910 had so frightened him that he had ended by fleeing, terror-stricken, into the north woods. And there he had become the “wild man.” How he had been living during those last three years, no one knew. No tale had come down to Wantebec of what he must have suffered during the three long freezing and starving winters. According to report he had managed to get together some castoff traps and snares; and with an old bow which he had picked up at the Lunge Lake Reservation he had learned to shoot like a savage. When the boys had encountered him, the summer before, a few miles below the lake, for all his quickness and his tremendous strength, he had seemed almost as inoffensive and as incapable of taking any real care of himself as some great child.

And of late the town had been hearing much of him. Since early June something [5]

had been leading him to leave the semisafety of his haunts in the woods. Every week or two he had been making his appearance about the spruce cutters’ shanties at Loggers’ Inlet. And the spirit of “new journalism” in the Wantebec Herald had been seizing upon him as the most attractive of humorous material. Uncle Billy Mc- Leash, who twice a month carried the mail up and down the river, was the innocent provider of the news items in the case. And the Herald's smart young man from Detroit worked them up, with the help of one of the town barbers, for his “Saturday Slapsticks.”

In the issue of June the twenty-ninth, the story was top-columned of how Jean Baptiste — or “Jombateest” — the shanty cook, had succeeded in feeding Ninny an apple-turnover filled with axle-grease.

The “Slapstick” of the week following was devoted to telling of Ninny’s unfortunate adventure with the shanty shotgun [ 6 ]

— “which, as it happened, had just been loaded with peas and salt.” The week after, as told in the Herald , another spruce-camp worthy — “Cash-down” Corkery — had celebrated the Fourth by getting “the world’s only genuine, stamped-in-thebottle wild man” to trade him his entire year’s take of peltries for six boxes of safety matches — that wouldn’t strike.

It was that week, too, that a party of young Indians from the Reservation, “who had been making life interesting for Ninny from the beginning,” had discovered and carried off his store of winter bedding. “And it looked like it might be a hard winter for wild men altogether.”

Rut not three days later, according to the “Slapsticks,” Ninny had come down and was hanging about Loggers’ Inlet again. This time the gang had got him into an empty shanty, bolted the door, and roared down the chimney at him with a megaphone till he had plunged, yelling, [ 7 ]

through a window, and, as the Herald's humorist told it, he “had left a trail of screeches and broken glass and blood behind him, that you could follow half-way round the lake!” -

The boys did not read those stories at all. There may have been others who read and laughed at them. But what is certain is that there were at least two old citizens of Wantebec, who, as story followed story, found it gradually more difficult to contain themselves. And when Tools’ father, Judge Emmett, read that last one, he contained himself no longer. With the Herald broken and crumpled in his hand, he started for Dr. Gordon’s, and the doctor, for his part, met him half-way.

“Gordon, have you — have you seen this week’s? ”

“I’ve seen it, and my fingers have been itching for my buggy whip ever since!”

“And do you realize, too, why the poor miserable creature has been coming back, [ 8 ]

and back, and back to the shanties like this ? It’s because it was somewhere thereabouts that he met the boys last summer, and was shown the only Christian kindness he’s had in the last three years! And now this summer he has some wretched, crackbrained hope of finding them up there again.”

“There doesn’t seem much doubt of that,” said the doctor. “But what can we do, Judge?”

“I made up my mind five minutes ago what we can do. Where are the boys?”

“Do you mean the Four, as they call themselves? Why, Bud Tuttle and Jack Harrison are over at South Falls, working in the beet fields, I think. Your Frank and my Bert are back there in their Club, if they’re where they generally are. But I don’t just see — ”

“Then they’ll do very well to begin with, ” and the judge pushed on furiously down the walk.

Meanwhile those two younger Argonauts of the Four, still holding down the Club alone, had let their minds go hankering back to that subject of subjects once more.

Again Booky had set down his Indian pot. He had had still another idea. “Say, if we hit it for South Falls, too, and all of us put in a month on the beets together, working like sin, too, don’t you think that that might get them off for part of August, anyway?”

Tools shook his head despondingly. “No, no, I sort of put that proposition up to Dad right when school was closing, but I could tell, all right, that he couldn’t see it.”

“No, and I guess I know mine wouldn’t, either. But, jinks, when you mind that last year you might say that we never really had any idea of the chance we were getting!”

“That’s right.” And Tools opened Jack’s last letter again:

“No use kicking,” it read. “This beet work is our only chance at another high school term in the fall, and Bud and I are both telling ourselves we’re dead lucky to get it.”

“They’re the real old stuff, all right!”

“They’re good enough for me. They wouldn’t do any kicking if they had it twice as hard.” And then once more, and for perhaps the twentieth time, Tools in his turn treated himself to the hollow pleasures of the imagination.

“But, gosh,” he said, “ only imagine how it’d feel! Of course I know all right that it couldn’t happen — but just supposing it could — imagine how it’d feel if somebody was to come in, right while we’re talking now, say, and tell us there was a job that’d start the whole four of us up

river next week! Who’s that? I

thought I heard — ”

He was further interrupted by the judge’s thumping and imperative double knock. And it was followed immediately by the judge in person.

“We want you boys,” he said, “Jack Harrison and Bud Tuttle along with you, to get ready to go up to Lunge Lake again!”

“And this time,” said the doctor, “we want you to bring Ninny Noggins down with you!”

Chapter Two Upriver!

^HE doctor had joined in that most breath-taking of marching orders; but it must be said that so far the judge seemed to be supplying the major part of the confidence.

“But — but we must remember,” said the doctor, “that the sheriff — Hynes, you know — failed when he went up there and tried to get hold of him.”

“That was because Ninny was afraid of him,” said the old man, fiercely. “By this time he’s afraid of any and all of us who are grown up, and with every reason. But he’d know the boys again. You may be sure he hasn’t forgotten that they were good to him before. They could simply stay up there till they got in touch with him — for my part I don’t care if it takes [ 13 ]

all summer — and once they do, why, I don’t believe they’d have to do much more than make a place for him in the stern of their boat and turn back down-stream!”

“All right. All right. I’m sure I’m heart and soul in favor of their chancing it.”

Meanwhile both Tools and Booky still sat speechless. They wanted to be absolutely sure that they were hearing aright. Besides, the judge mightn’t know that Bud and Jack were over at South Falls.

But Tools mustered up the courage to tell him now. “They’ve got a weeding job,” he said, “and I think it’s going to take them all summer.”

“It’s going to take them just till I can get word to them over the telephone to-night.” The judge snapped it out as if he were taking a bite out of him.

“But,” Booky ventured, “they’ll need the money. They’ve got to have it for their fees next fall.”

It was well that Booky’s father was there, or he might have had a piece snapped out of him as well. As it was: “Do you think, young man,” said the judge, “that we haven’t thought about that? I’ll see that they don’t lose any money by it. I’ll provide for the matter of any fees that they’ll be needing.”

“With my assistance, Judge, with my assistance,” the doctor put in, with a little laugh.

“Very good, sir. I’ll be very glad to have it. All I know is that I can’t stand any more — I’ve reached the end of this /” and twisting that crumped Herald , which he still carried like a baton, into a knot, he flung it through the open window.

“Now,” he said to Tools, “maybe you can tell me how I can get to your friends by ’phone?”

Tools could tell him very easily. For by this time — the sun was falling low — Bud and Jack would be sitting somewhere [ 15 ]

in the shade of that South Falls boarding-house. Within five minutes he and Booky were speaking to them. And by the end of another five minutes everything was settled!

It was somewhat sobering, of course, to have been given that mission of finding and bringing Ninny back. In one way it was not exactly the same as going up the Wantebec merely to look for prehistoric mounds.

But, as Doctor Gordon pointed out, everything wouldn’t be done in a day. It was very unlikely that they would meet with Ninny the first hour they struck camp. To plunge into the bush with the idea of finding him would be craziness. They would simply have to choose the likeliest place, pitch camp, and wait. While they were waiting, whether it was one week or four, there was no reason in the world why they shouldn’t hunt for mounds from sun- 116 ]

rise till dewy eve, and when they had found Ninny it mightn’t be the best wisdom in the world to try to rush back with him at once. Take it altogether, they would very probably have all the time up river that they needed.

“Only remember,” he added, “Ninny must always be the first consideration.”

They gave him their word for it.

“Another thing, too,” said the judge, “those Lunge Lake islands now belong to Major Maggs.”

“But we could ask him to let us dig, provided we dug scientifically,” argued Booky, a little nervously, “and that’s all we’d be digging for.”

The judge snorted a bit. But, “Oh, certainly, certainly!” he said.

And for his part, Doctor Gordon went along with them to the major’s real estate office and spoke for them.

Major Maggs was Wantebec’s “prosperity promoter,” but he was a “pro- [ 17 ]

moter” who had never deceived any one but his own unquenchably sanguine self. And at that, too, one lobe of his brain managed to preserve a steady and unlooked-for balance which always kept him in a state of serai-prosperity, at least. A few months before — when the promise of car shops for North Wantebec and a furniture factory for Mill Bend had immediately convinced the major that “ within five years, sir, or at latest ten, Wantebec would be the Chicago of the state!” — he had at a single sweep projected his eye a hundred miles to the north and bought up the whole tangled and unsurveyed, rock-and-evergreen archipelago in Lunge Lake.

“For on the day when Wantebec does become a second Chicago,” he asseverated, “there is one thing that will be an instant crying necessity, and that is, a great summer resort, a really great summer resort within ready access, within ready access of — of any one desiring to go to a summer [ 18 ]

resort ! There will come a time, gentlemen, ” (if you allowed the major to talk to you long enough for him to get his hands clutched together under his coat-tails, he always ended by addressing you as “gentlemen”) “and it will be here before we realize it, when those Lunge Lake islands will be at once the summer home of Greater Wantebec and the Chautauqua of the North West!”

In the meantime those islands were a Chautauqua with an Indian reservation on one side, and a very un-Chautauqua-like camp of spruce cutters on the other; and the major may have had some secret feeling that if the archipelago was to achieve its manifest destiny “before you realized it,” the initial hand of civilization could not be laid upon it too soon. At any rate he not only granted the expedition the broadest charter rights to explore and dig, but he “guaranteed furthermore to bring any discoveries they should make to the attention [ 19 ]

of the proper authorities at Washington. For, without giving you all my reasons for so thinking, gentlemen,” he concluded impressively, “it would not in the least surprise me if the small but remarkable mound which you have already located should prove to be the first of further discoveries ranking among the most extraordinary ever made upon this continent.”

Two days later Jack and Bud came up from South Falls, and the expedition proceeded to the equipment stage.

It was to go in the “Twenty-footer” — the skiff that was the particular pride of Frank Emmett’s big brother, Charlie. She was the strongest, fastest, daintiest bit of cedar and walnut-trim on the river. She had rowlocks for four pair of oars. And hence, when you used only two pair, but arranged them alternately, a crew of four could take her through the water like a racing shell. As for steering, you might say she steered herself. In addition to [ 20 ]

which, she possessed a system of lockers, big and little, bow, stern, and amidships, that were, taken together, only a little less commodious than a wardrobe trunk, and, taken singly, rather more fascinating than a chest full of secret drawers.

With the idea of filling those lockers to the best advantage, the four were now nightly resolving themselves into a committee on supplies. The doctor greatly simplified their planning by having the stern lockers measured for a series of tin cases, in which to keep their “commissariat.”

“In proportion as you empty them,” he explained just a bit facetiously, “you can fill them up with the proceeds of your mound-hunting.”

Oatmeal and flour, a little baking-powder, salt, sugar, coffee, and bacon, all these, the old reliables, went without saying, and they would take what bread they could. But they might be away six weeks, and needless to say they could not take enough.

Whereupon the judge remembered that, when as a boy he had run away to sea from Gloucester, he had been amazed at the filling and sustaining powers of pilot biscuit, and he now insisted upon sending to New York the same day for twenty -five pounds of them.

“Not a word now!” he shut them up. “You’ll find that properly soaked in water, and eaten with a little salt, two of them will make you a good square meal; and before you get back, I promise you you’ll be abundantly thankful that I thought of them. ”

A general, and highly disrespectful mispronunciation of their club name — the “Argonauts” — had for the last year given the Four a second appellation — the “ Argue-nots,” and they wisely lived up to the appellation when they were talking to the judge. But, in a way, to freight twenty-five pounds of pilot biscuit along with them was to lose sight of the fact that they were [ 22 ]

taking their bass rods; and if the waters of the Upper Wantebec and Lunge Lake didn’t do their share towards keeping the pantry full, they had fallen off greatly from what they used to be!

It was also to lose sight of the fact that Jack was taking the “Twenty -two,” the one weakness of that otherwise rather serious and grown-up-minded youth. The “Twenty-two” was a worn and dingy little old Flobert, for which her original owner may possibly have paid three dollars. She carried a bullet not much larger or more dangerous than a duck-shot. Her barrel was constantly becoming “plugged,” this being no doubt attributable to some marked originality in her rifling. Her sights shifted slightly every time she was jolted, and accordingly required to be readjusted as frequently as a compass seems to require to be boxed.

“But you don’t go by her sights, anyway,” Jack contended, “and it’s just that, too, [ 23 ]

that gives her her value. She teaches a fellow to shoot free arm.”

Enough that we have shown that the “Twenty-two” could boast of qualities possessed by no other gun on earth. It had been no more than her just deserts that had made her one of the Club’s veritable mascots. And old Job Johnson, the ancient river-man who kept the boat-house, oiled that “Twenty -two,” and tightened her sights and bored her out once more.

It was old Job, too, who showed the Four how to roll and strap their sleeping-bags, filled with their “stuff,” into genuine coureur de bois packs, and how to arrange them across their shoulders so as to get the weight balanced right. 4 4 Once do that,’ ’ he said, 44 and you could take a two-mile portage carryin’ your own weight, and never damp a feather.”

When, likewise, Job discovered that they were going north without a supply of “six-inchers,” he compelled them forthwith and [ 24 ]

without denial to accept several pounds of his own. One might infer from old Job that you might find yourself in the bush without food, roof, or sense of direction, but if you only had an axe, a fishing line, and six-inch spikes enough, it would be merely a matter of a day or two till you were living in a hotel and having your meals sent up.

Those sleeping-bags were simply good heavy gray blankets, double length, turned end to end, stitched strongly down the sides, and then turned inside out. The doctor had an extra blanket or two, as well as a few rough clothes, put in for Ninny. For themselves, when it came to clothes, the Four were taking a minimum. Old shoes and stockings, sweaters, knickers, and bathing suits — to serve as underwear — if these weren’t enough, they would have to be. Mrs. Tuttle and Mrs. Harrison, with whom money was very much a consideration, made Bud and Jack their [ 25 ]

knickers by the simple and inexpensive method of shearing off their first old “longs” at the knees, banding them up, and attaching belt straps; and remarkably good knickers they made.

But there was still the bulk of their stuff to get together. In the matter of a tent, they settled on Booky’s new one, though it was a little smaller than the one they’d had the year before. Its poles they left behind. Good enough substitutes could be cut anywhere in fifteen minutes. They took two spades and four trowels for the digging. Bud put in his folding camp-stove. Into the long forward lockers of the Twenty-footer went their cooking gear and tin dishes, a carving knife and a hand-axe, a candle lantern and two boxes of candles, a coil of half -inch rope and Jack’s climbing spurs.

They had agreed to take only absolute necessities, but with Tools it went without saying that this included his camera. “Jinks,” he said, “supposing we make a [ 26 ]

find — we’ll have to have photographs of it!”

In that conscientious and scientific attitude he was strongly supported by Booky. The photographer also took along a box of magnesium flashes — “ because they might make their find at night.” This on the face of it was improbable, and just why it should have been necessary to include therewith a cone of “red fire,” left over from the Fourth, Tools could hardly have explained with clearness himself.

“But,” as he said again, “you know these things always come in somewhere.”

It was no doubt with the same idea that Booky had covertly filled all the locker space around that camera with blue and dark-brown Archaeological Reports.

On the other hand, remembering Ninny’s fondness for honey, in one of their tin cases the boys had stowed two fat pound combs from the best of Mr. Tuttle’s patent hives. They would serve to renew confidence and

[Vt]

friendship if nothing else would. For let no one think the real purpose of the expedition was forgotten. First, last, and always, it was going to be Ninny first!

By Wednesday morning they were ready. They got away about half -past ten. The Twenty-footer had been loaded in the quiet slip beside old Job’s boat-house, and for the last time he helped them, and the little knot of fathers and big brothers looked her over. But everything was shipshape, everything in its place, and every locker crammed. There was a minute or two of final handgrips, and the Four stepped aboard.

The judge felt that the occasion called for something of judicial sternness. “Remember, now, remember,” he said, “you’re not going as so many youngsters, but on your honor and responsibility.”

The doctor took a much more confident view of things. “Oh, I think they’re going to remember, all right,” he said. “And — Jack,” — he tried to hit him with a neatly [ 28 ]

pitched little Red Astrachan, — “you. see to it that that son of mine, Bert, there, does an extra share of the rowing. He’s not sitting on an Archaeological Report at the present moment, is he? I can see plainly that you’re going to be the leader. You make that young bookworm work.”

Booky thought of what was in that forward locker, and he became uncommonly red.

“Well, now, I think they’re not going to disappoint us,” said Bud’s father, Mr. Tuttle, a nervous little man — and more nervous at finding himself standing beside the judge.

The current drew the boat further and further out. The four oars swung back, crisply feathering. Old Job raised his Winchester repeater. The departure must be made official.

“Are you ready?”

“Let her go!”

And three times he pumped the trigger. Whang! Bang! Whang!

Following the triple report, and almost like a series of reports itself, went up the new Club yell:

“ Camp — cots !

Tents! Pots!

Grub? Lots I

We’re the ancient order

Of the Argue-nots /

And they were off!

To the town at large, it was simply a fishing trip. No one outside of their own people knew they intended going above Ragged Rapids. But to the Four it was to be a Stanley Relief, and a Mycenaean Exploring expedition all in one!

Yes, and it was to be a great deal more than that. Could any of those four fathers have been given even a partial glimpse of what that next month up the Wantebec was to contain, it was an expedition which would never have left that boat-house wharf at all!

-

Chapter Three First Days— And A Fish!

HEAD of them stretched the five winding miles of river and the

^ ^ crooked length of Eleven Mile

Lake, which together were to make up the first day’s schedule. It was a good long run, but the fresh morning sun was not too hot, and from behind them there came a glorious, snapping breeze, which almost neutralized the current. Not one of the Four but felt a something within him, a kind of joyous, bursting strength, which seemed capable of pulling the Twenty-footer up a mill-race.

At least all of them felt that way for the first hour or two, and then they began to feel that they might just as well take things at a more leisurely gait. They reminded themselves that after all they had several weeks ahead in which to try themselves; and in the case of Booky, his palms had begun to pink up noticeably already. When Jack saw that, contrary to the doctor’s instructions, he made Booky and Tools drop their oars for awhile. Tools shipped the rudder and steered, and Bud, with Jack stroking, rowed pairs.

But all the while that following breeze from the south was freshening. When they entered Eleven Mile they got the full strength of it, and with it came from Tools’ ever fertile mind his first “idea.” Why not sail? They hadn’t any sail with them, nor any mast; but little things like that shouldn’t make any difference. At Tools’ ingenious suggestion, they got out the lightest of the blankets, lashed it to a pair of oars just below the blades and above the thole pins, lashed lines above the upper blanket ties again, making the same fast by a running noose about the thwarts furthest aft. That gave them two masts, [ 32 ]