The boys had been on their island for more than a week when they
resolved to make an excursion to Schroon, which was the nearest
village, in order to get some sugar, coffee, and other necessaries.
Schroon Lake, or rather the lower end of it, was not more than five
miles from Brandt Lake; but there was a range of high hills between the
two, and the village of Schroon was situated at the head of the lake,
which was nearly ten miles in length. A long and tiresome journey was,
therefore, before them, and they ought to have started early in the
morning; but they did not start until nearly eleven o’clock. Harry,
Tom, and Joe were to go to Schroon together, and Jim was to stay at the
island until six o’clock, when he was to row over to the west shore
and bring the others back to the camp.
[Illustration: BIDDING JIM GOOD-BYE.]
When they bade good-bye to Jim, the three other boys assured him that
they would certainly be back as early as six o’clock, and warned him
not to fail to meet them with the boat. They then started to cross
the hills, following a foot-path, that was so little used that it
was hardly visible. Unfortunately the path led through a thicket of
raspberry bushes, and the fruit was so tempting that the boys lost a
good deal of time by stopping to gather it. After a tiresome tramp
under the mid-day sun they reached the lower end of Schroon Lake, where
they hired a crank little row-boat, and rowed up to Schroon. There was
a fresh northerly breeze which delayed them; and the spray from the bow
of the boat sprinkled them, so that they were uncomfortably wet when
they reached the village. By this time they were very hungry as well
as tired, and so they went to the hotel for dinner. It was half-past
six o’clock when they started to row down the lake, and several men
who saw them warned them that they were running a good deal of risk in
attempting to return at so late an hour.
The trip down the lake was certainly a rather foolhardy one; for there
was a good deal of wind and sea, and long before they reached the
landing-place it was quite dark. But the boys were anxious to get back
to their camp, and for the first time during the cruise they acted
somewhat recklessly. However, they met with no accident; and when they
had returned the boat to its owner, they set out to cross the hills.
The path was not easy to find in the daylight, and it was next to
impossible to find it in the night. A dozen times the boys lost
themselves, and were compelled to depend entirely upon the stars to
direct their course. The woods had been all cleared away for a space
of a mile or a mile and a half wide between the two lakes, except just
along the shore of Brandt Lake; so that it was not absolutely necessary
for them to keep in the path, as it would have been had they been
passing through a thick forest. Still it was not pleasant to lose the
path, and stumble over stones and stumps, and of course it made the
journey longer. They must have walked at least seven or eight miles on
their way back before they finally reached their own lake at midnight,
at the point where they expected to find Jim waiting for them.
Neither Jim nor the boat was there. He had waited until ten o’clock,
and then, making up his mind that they had decided to spend the night
at Schroon, he rowed back to the island, and went calmly to bed. An
hour later a dense fog settled over the lake; and when the tired boys
reached the shore they could see but a few yards in front of their eyes.
It was a terrible disappointment, but Harry tried to be cheerful. “We
shall have to stay here to-night, boys,” said he; “but we will build a
good fire and keep warm.” Tom said that he thought that was the best
thing to do, for without a fire they would suffer severely from the
cold, wet fog, and he asked Harry if he had any matches. Harry had
none, Joe had none, and Tom had none; so the plan of building a fire
came to nothing.
The cold gradually chilled them as they stood talking over their
adventure, and their teeth began to chatter. Joe said he wished he
could get hold of Jim for about five minutes, so that he could warm
himself up by convincing him that he ought not to have taken the
boat back to the island. Harry said nothing; but he was wondering
whether he would freeze to death in the fog, and tried to remember how
travellers overtaken by the snow on the Alps contrive to fight off the
terrible drowsiness that steals over them when they are freezing. Tom
was more practical. He did not expect to freeze in July, although he
was miserably cold; and he did not want to punish Jim for a mistake
of judgment. He knew that the house where they were accustomed to get
milk was not far off, and that a boat usually lay on the shore near
the house; so he proposed to Harry and Joe to borrow the boat and make
their way into the camp.
“If we go to that house at this time of night, we shall get shot,”
remarked Harry. “The man is an ugly-tempered chap, and I heard him say
the other day that if he ever heard anything prowling around the house
at night, he always fired at it.”
“Then we won’t ask him for his boat: we’ll borrow it without leave, and
Jim can bring it back in the morning,” replied Tom.
“This is nice conduct for Moral Pirates,” said Joe. “Capturing a vessel
at night is real piracy, and when Jim takes the boat back the man
will be sure to shoot him. I’m sorry for Jim; but I hope it will be
a warning to him not to leave his friends in such a fix that they’ve
either got to borrow a boat without leave, or freeze.”
They made their way stealthily and with great difficulty to the place
where the boat lay. It was high and dry on the beach, and though the
fog hid the house where the owner of the boat lived, the boys knew that
it was very near. They launched the boat with the utmost caution, lest
any noise should awaken the bad-tempered man with the shotgun. They
had it almost launched, when Harry’s foot slipped on a wet stone, and
he fell with a dismal crash, clinging to the boat, and dragging Tom and
Joe down with him.
It was very certain that if anything could wake the owner of the boat,
he must be awake by this time; so the boys sprang up, and shoving
the boat into the water regardless of the noise, seized the oars,
and rowed away into the fog. When they had gained what they thought
a safe distance from the shore they ceased rowing, and congratulated
themselves that they were all right at last. To be sure, Harry had
scraped his ankle badly; Tom had forgotten the coffee, and left it on
the shore; and Joe had put the sugar in the bottom of the leaky boat,
where it was rapidly dissolving into sirup; but they were once more
afloat, and expected to reach their comfortable camp within the next
twenty minutes.
There was not a particle of air stirring, and not a star was visible,
so they had absolutely nothing to steer by. They could not even hear
the sound of the water which ordinarily lapped the shore. Still they
were not discouraged. Harry thought he knew which way the camp lay, and
so he and Tom rowed in what they imagined was the right direction.
They rowed for two hours without finding the island, and without
reaching the shore. They could not understand it. The lake seemed to
have grown in the night, and to have reached the size of Lake Ontario.
They knew that by daylight they could row across it at its widest part
in less than an hour, but now it seemed impossible to find any shore.
Joe had just suggested that they had made a mistake in coming back from
Schroon, and had walked all the way to Lake Champlain, on which they
were now rowing, when the bow of the boat struck the shore.
It was some consolation to know that the lake actually had a shore;
but they could not tell what part of the shore they had reached. They
pushed off again, and resumed their hopeless search for the camp. A
new trouble now harassed them. From seeming to have no shore at all,
the lake now seemed to have shrunk to a mere mud-puddle. No matter
in what direction they rowed, they would strike the shore within ten
minutes, and always at a different place. Joe said that he had never
dreamed that so much shore and so little lake could be put together.
Toward morning Harry and Tom became too tired to row, and they lay down
in the bottom of the wet boat, and tried to keep warm by lying close
to each other. Joe took the oars, and tried to row without hitting the
shore; but he had hardly dipped his oars when the bow grated on the
pebbles. He promptly gave up the attempt, and making the boat fast to a
tree, joined Tom and Harry, and shared their misery.
They were much too cold and wretched to sleep, but they managed to
keep from growing positively stiff with cold. The sun rose, but it
did not for a long time make any impression on the fog. All at once,
about seven o’clock, the fog vanished; and the boys found themselves
in a little bay near the extreme northerly part of the lake. They had
been rowing across this little bay, first in one direction and then
in another, during all those miserable hours when they found such an
unaccountable quantity of shore.
Of course they rowed down to the camp, where they found Jim still
sleeping soundly, with a contented, happy look that was awfully
exasperating. They woke him up, and scolded him with all the strength
they had left, and then, putting on dry clothes, “turned in,” and slept
all day. Jim towed the borrowed boat back, but was not shot; and the
boys afterward said that, on the whole, they were rather glad that he
still lived, and that they would mercifully forgive him.