Bruce Weston Munro

“ George observed, “I must go on alone, with Steve close behind to measure my shadow. If we all go crowding along together, somebody will get shoved into the river.”
The wisdom of this was so apparent that the rest waited patiently while the other two went on.
George walked cautiously along the bank of the river, and when the rising moon threw a faint shadow of his figure on the bark of the evergreen, he halted. Stephen, however, stepped up so briskly and boldly, and so near the brink, that shovelfuls of loose earth rattled down into the water. ”

“ Thou must not go!”
“To love is either happiness or pain; to love, and to be loved again,—oh, this is ecstasy!”
[333]
“Oh, Marmaduke, you thrill my heart with joy!”
“Alas, dear Sauterelle, that love and duty should thus clash! But, oh, I must not marry thee; I am so far beneath thee. Dear Sauterelle, thou wilt return to France and be the wife of some great prince, while I, alas! shall wear my life away in hopelessness and grief. And yet, oh Sauterelle, I love thee so! I love thee so! I fear I yet shall yield to love, forgetting duty.” ”

“ Stephen gave up his whole attention to the delightful and thoroughly boyish pastime of swimming. In all probability he thought no more of his dog, believing him to be in full pursuit of the “squirrel.” But Bob had no sooner got under way than Stephen spied him.
Contrary to all the laws which regulate the actions of the heroes of romance, he engaged in conversation with the depraved youth. A hero in a book would have looked the other way in dignified silence when such a wretch came in sight, but not so Steve. ”

“ Again, the story is not written to instruct studious and solemn boys, who mope about the house with grave biographies and heavy ancient histories in their hands, while without, the sun is shining bright, birds are warbling their extempore melodies in the fruit-trees, squirrels are frisking across the garden-walks, and all Nature is smiling. Such people are not boys; they are but figure-heads in creation, who, though they may, perhaps, find a place in so-called “literature,” will never find one in the history of nations. ”

“ But Marmaduke, who had hitherto held his tongue, now came to the front, saying eagerly, “Bones! Bones! Let me see!”
He rummaged among the branches, and while Will, Charles, and Stephen, crowded around him, George looked on “askance.”
“O-o-h!” gasped Marmaduke, “what a horrible discovery we have made! Bones! Bones of a mortal! Boys,” with emotion, “Some one was Foully Murdered Here.”
“O-o-h!” echoed all the boys, as in duty bound.
But Steve gave a horrible chuckle, and whispered to Charles, “It works already with him; and,” pointing his elbow at George, “he’ll come around.” ”

“ In the confusion of the moment, George probably took it for one of his “sprites;” and he dropped Steve’s bow, stepped on it, and broke it.
Marmaduke felt that there must be something ghostly and necromantic in such a cry, coming, in the hush of evening, from a shapely evergreen that rose beside a rolling, moonlit river.
Jim was seized with a painful attack of his chills, and ran bellowing homewards.
Stephen, impetuous and heedless as ever, picked up a stone and threw it furiously into the tree.
The reader of fiction does not need to be told that “all this happened in an instant.” ”

“ Charles and Stephen had been whispering together and exchanging winks while the others were speaking, and the former now said, with feigned seriousness: “Certainly you don’t, George. It’s a likely story that a boy like you believes in a bald-headed, goggle-eyed, broken-nosed necromancer, that never washes his hands, nor blows his broken nose, nor combs his whiskers, nor cuts his toenails. No, George, you read too much science to believe in such a dilapidated ruin as a necromancer must be; but, as you say, it would be roaring fun to follow his directions. ”

“ Though great harm has been done, I will not punish you, for the odium of this affair and the prickings of your conscience will be sufficient punishment. Your dog, the sportive Tip, is dead, as I suppose you know. You will acknowledge that no one except yourself is to be blamed for that. But one word more: I advise you all to hasten to your homes, to try to forget this shameful occurrence, and never to practice cowardly tricks.”
Steve did not know that Tip was dead, and he gave a convulsive gasp and then burst into a flood of tears, for he loved his dog. ”

“ But Steve has nothing to do with sailor-boys; and as we do not wish to incur the displeasure of such heroes,—much less the displeasure of their ghosts,—or to compel anybody to fall in love with him, it will be the wisest course to leave it for impartial readers to praise him or to condemn him, to love him or to detest him, as their judgment may determine.
George and Marmaduke, to the best of their ability, cultivated the science of grammar; Stephen cultivated the art of dismembering grammars, and of blazoning their fly-leaves with hideous designs of frolicsome sea-serpents ”

“ George said honestly.
“You read too much, George;” Will commented sorrowfully. “We won’t try to fool you any more.”
“The worst of it is,” Charles said, with a droll smile, “is that one of us can’t make fun of another, for we all made fools of ourselves.”
“There’s Jim,” Steve suggested.
“So there is! Well, what about the murder?”
“It certainly is a skeleton,” Marmaduke said grimly.
“Well, to please you, let us call it an ‘open question,’” George, who was now in jubilant spirits, observed.
“Let us go back and look for the lost trinket; that will solve the problem;” Stephen proposed. ”

“ The plotters, Henry included, quaked with fear. Was their ingenious scheme, the much-loved plot, which had cost so much “blood and treasure,” to come to nought? Had Marmaduke detected some flaw in the letter which had escaped their notice? Were they about to be unmasked in all their wickedness?
O plotters, your scheme, which was based and reared on fraud, was to proceed successful to the end.
“Wh-what is wrong?” Charley asked, with a quavering voice, his lips of that “ashy hue” which good romancers delight in introducing. ”

“ Bob sprang courageously, but wildly. Alas! “the best-laid schemes of mice and men—” the rest is not English.
The tangled rope in his hands proved his downfall; it coiled round his feet with a merciless grip, and he alighted on the raft in a sorry plight. There he lay, sprawling and struggling, a most ludicrous sight. The more he struggled to free himself, the more tightly he was encircled by the terrible coils. Boys, the youth who becomes entangled in one thousand feet of rope is to be pitied.
To add to his misery, shout after shout of laughter burst from the entire six. ”

“ Henry, Charley, George, or even Marmaduke, could have outwitted him easily; Steve would have made him a prisoner, ten to one, and escaped at his leisure. Oh! this is horrible! I must get away!”
He jumped lightly off the bed, and knelt before the door. By good fortune, he found a crack through which he could observe every movement made by the demon.
“Well, this is a good beginning!” he said, hopefully, “I shall watch till he goes to bed, and then try again.”
But the demon, with provoking composure, sat and dozed before his fire.
Time passed exceedingly slowly to poor Will. ”

“ Oh reader, I am a prisoner! A wicked man has captured me and taken me away from my country. I am the daughter of one of the lords of France, the Duke de la Chaloupe, in Poitou. An enemy of my father—although he is the best man in the world he has his enemies, nevertheless, but it is because he is a favorite of our mighty emperor, Napoleon the Third—I repeat, an enemy of his, a pitiless scoundrel—a wretch—a DEMON, cast about to hit upon some plot to ruin him. ”

“ This heavy cloud of romance obscured the boy’s ideas, and sometimes caused him to speak and act more like a hero of fiction than was seemly. When alone he would slide his hand into his bosom over his heart, whenever the weight of romance and mystery was more than ordinarily oppressive, and if his heart beat fast he was satisfied with himself. ”

“ Charles commented sarcastically, but without a smile.
“Charge!” cried the general valiantly, when about thirty feet from the door.
A blind rush was made; but barely five steps had been taken when the general, who of course led, tripped over a stone, and the entire “squad” fell headlong, the “ram” and its grisly inhabitants descending on their backs with a cruel thud.
Of course no bones were broken, gentle reader, for it is impossible to kill a hero, and, as a general rule, impossible to hurt one. And all these were heroes. ”

“ Steve returned. “Any boy with two eyes isn’t going to get so far astray in these woods.”
“Well, what if it isn’t the place we think it is?” Will asked.
“Oh, you will have to give in that it’s murder,” Marmaduke said. “I knew it was murder all the time. How do you know that nobody was ever murdered here? You don’t know anything about bones; George is most likely right.”
“Don’t make a fool of yourself again, Marmaduke; let us go home,” Steve growled, and he had taken a step homeward, when a long and doleful cry, followed by a hideous and piercing scream, electrified all the boys. ”

“ My Marmaduke, I’ll call again the priest.”
“Thy father!—No, no! I dare not meet thy father!”
“Dread not my father’s ire. He loves his child; his child loves thee. Ah, thou art all mine own, for all that thou hast urged is but a paper wall.”
“Dear Sauterelle, I must admit I love thee well. To be thine own—oh, joy! But no; it cannot be. I have no wealth, no heritage at all. A wife is far from me.”
[332]
“Wealth? What is wealth to me? Wealth is an idle word—non-entity—a gin—a snare—a clap-trap. How should we live? ”

“ Then the man who had not read romances for nothing stole softly to the door, and knocked in a peculiar manner.
Without a moment’s hesitation, a voice within said, “Well done!”
Steve faced the others and winked furiously, while he reasoned rapidly to this effect: “Evidently, here is a nest of knaves. The fellow on the inside thinks his mate is in danger, and knocks to know whether it is safe for him to enter.”
Then the voice within asked uneasily, “Jim?”
“Will,” said Marmaduke, leaning over the litter, “we are certainly on the track of the man who stole your deer!” ”

“ Next, the donkey last caught was hitched to the rope, and by dint of entreaty, induced to draw its yoke-fellow out of the gloomy prison.
“Saved!” cried Stephen, in tragic accents, as he turned both donkeys loose. “Saved! And I have saved you!”
And then he fell to turning summersets, chuckling, and disporting himself like a noodle. “Oh! this is fun!” he said.
A heavy fall brought the boy to his senses; and without more ado he gathered up his belongings and began to whistle “Yankee Doodle,” as only a boy whose conscience is tranquillized can whistle it. ”

“ La fenêtre treillissée de ma cabine, ou prison, donne sur la demeure de mes ancêtres, et je vois courir ça et là nos serviteurs, avec des cris aigres de chagrin et d’horreur. Trop tard! le maroufle s’évade avec sa captive! Oh, mon cher père et ma chère mère! Qu’êtes-vous devenus!
Le yacht a marché quelques heures quand il entre un homme dans ma cabine, suivi de mon précepteur, le bon prêtre. Je reconnais Bélître Scélérat, l’ennemi de mon papa! C’est lui qui m’a captivée. “Tranquillisez-vous,” me dit-il; “je ne vous ferai pas de mal. ”

“ The plotters soon landed, and crowded around Stephen.
“What a fire, Steve,” said Charley. “It smells as if you’d been burning a witch.”
[141]
“Come on, Steve,” said Will; “we’ve got a good boat, and we’re off for a cruise before they set the tables.”
Steve’s face brightened, then clouded, and he said, hopelessly, “I can’t go.”
“Can’t go?” echoed Charley. “Why, Stunner, what’s the matter with you? You look like a phantom, and here you sit, like an Indian idol; taking no exercise, having no fun, and doing nothing! Come now, you’ve got to go with us.” ”

“ After a solemn silence, Stephen asked faintly, “Boys, what’s a writ of summons? Isn’t it something awful?”
The Sage brightened and answered him thus: “Yes, Steve, it is a dreadful instrument of justice to deliver culprits up to the fury of Law—to trial, punishment, and torture.”
Steve, who had a very vague notion of what the word instrument means, instantly thought of thumb-screws, racks, and divers other engines of torture, that our “chivalrous” forefathers were so ingenious as to invent and so diabolical as to use.
“Boys,” said Charles, “we are in a worse scrape than ever before. ”

“ The lover very often feels his rival to be the most despicable person on the face of the earth; and yet, at the same instant, he fears that rival, despicable as he is, will steal away the heart of his beloved.
To a man whose thoughts never rise above the earth on which he walks, this may seem preposterous; but it is true, and may easily be explained—so easily, in fact, that the writer leaves it for some one who can do so more ably and clearly than himself.
It has been said that Henry was fated never to explore the Demon’s Cave. ”

“ The writer seems most at home when attempting to poke fun at romance; yet he is tormented night and day, so much so that he has no peace, with romance. In fact, gentle reader, if any human being suffers more in that way than he, pity him with all your heart, for he must be a wretch indeed. ”

“ This fan effectually cleared the apartment of smoke, but what became of the smoke was to Will an appalling mystery.
As time passed, and no relief came, Will’s uneasiness returned. His anxiety about Henry became intolerable; he could endure it no longer. Better even to anger the demon than sit in silence and suffer torments. When he went out, surely he must have seen Henry.
This hero was one of those extremely patient people who, lest they should incommode somebody else, will endure untold agony, when a simple question might set all their doubts and fears at rest. ”

“ Well, it’s burnt up now, from stem to stern.”
“Yes, Henry; but it isn’t a very good way to keep out of mischief; it—it makes me feel very miserable. George would say we are incendiaries.”
“Who’s George? Somebody that is nobody, I guess. Well, at any rate, that isn’t the word. Giantize is a great deal better. To giantize, Will, is to eat like a giant; to do big things; to astonish the natives; to be a hero; to rescue captives. We’ll giantize to-morrow night when we rescue the man—if there is a man—in the Demon’s Cave. ”

“ Now, Marmaduke always notices people’s ears,—at least, I guess he does,—so let me pull the flaps of the sun-bonnet clear over them.”
But good-natured Henry was only human,—or perhaps if his ears were so pretty, and somebody else had said they were, he did not wish to hide them,—and now he turned his one blazing eye full upon the boy, and said, almost fiercely: “Stephen, let me alone! I can barely manage to work my way along the road, as it is! Don’t you know, Steve,” he added mildly, “that it is hard enough for a fellow to get along in this world with all his five senses in full play?” ”