THE MYSTERY AT CAMP LENAPE

CARL SAXON Author of “Blackie Thorne at Camp Lenape”

BOOKS, INC. NEW YORK BOSTON

COPYRIGHT 1940, 1931 BY BOOKS, INC. MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CHAPTER I BATTLE-ROYAL

The Utway twins were at it again.

“You are, too!” said Jake.

“You’re another!” said Jerry.

“And you’re his brother!” said Jake.

It was “quiet hour” in Camp Lenape. The peace of Sunday afternoon hung above the rows of white tents on the hillside above the placid lake. In Tent Ten, however, the quiet was broken by a sudden uproar.

Six wide-awake lads perched on upper bunks, grinning and nudging each other. All eyes were turned on two bronze-haired, blue-eyed, sun-browned boys who faced each other in the center of the tent.

As they stood thus, it seemed as if there was only one boy, looking at himself in a large mirror; for the Utway twins were so much alike that others often wondered how one of them knew whether he was himself, or his brother—whether Jerry did not sometimes wake in the morning and think for a moment that he might possibly be Jake. The resemblance was heightened by the fact that both wore identical outfits—the basketball shorts and green-and-white jersey that served as the camp uniform.

However, while Jerry wore a tennis sneaker on each foot, Jake wore only one. The other shoe he brandished in an upraised arm with a threatening air.

“That’s talking,” put in “wild Willie” Sanders, from his perch above the two brothers. “You tell him, Jake!”

Jake turned on the speaker. “No noise from the nickel seats!” he warned. “This is our business—no butting in. Now, Jerry, take back what you said.”

“Well, take back what you said!” responded Jerry with some spirit. “And quit aiming that shoe at me! Put it down!”

“Keep off!”

The band of onlookers, now reinforced by the grinning faces of many inmates of neighboring tents, chuckled with delight. It looked as if there was going to be a fight at last. And the watchers knew from past experience that if the Utway twins got to scrapping again, the resulting action would do much to brighten up a dull Sunday afternoon. Therefore they waited happily for the first gong of the coming battle.

It looked as though Jerry meant business. With a swift rush he attempted to snatch the menacing shoe from his brother’s hand. Jake neatly dodged, and swung the improvised weapon in a dangerous arc. His fingers slipped on the smooth rubber of the sole, and the shoe hurled itself with some force at Jerry’s chest.

Jerry grunted as the flying sneaker took him in the midriff. He was not hurt, but he was mad. He had forgotten completely what the original quarrel was about; he knew that the shoe had been flung by accident, but didn’t care; all he thought of was to “get even” with Jake. He snatched the nearest thing at hand, which happened to be a canteen belonging to little Pete Lister, and flung it wildly at his brother.

Jake dodged again, and returned this fire with an unwieldy missile that proved to be Fat Crampton’s generously-built raincoat. This went wild of the mark, and he ducked a whizzing flashlight while at the same time reaching about for more ammunition. His hand touched “Sherlock” Jones’s camera-case, and he was about to aim this at Jerry’s head when he was taken full in the face with a canvas pillow, followed by a sweater and a Boy Scout Handbook.

“Hey!” cried Jones, jumping down from his bunk in alarm, now that his treasured possession was in danger, “that’s my camera-case you got!”

The contested object sailed past his ear and met its mark on Jerry’s leg. By this time Jerry was in no frame of mind to distinguish friend from enemy. He was seeing red, and the sight of young Jones dashing toward him to regain his property raised his temper to the boiling point. He reached out and greeted the oncoming boy with the contents of a handy water-bucket.

The bucket was half full, sufficient to make a drenching torrent which reduced the hapless Jones to a sopping state. His cry of rage filled the tent. Wild Willie Sanders came to his rescue, and together they advanced on Jerry, who was now armed with a loose tent-peg swinging on the end of its rope.

Jake had taken advantage of his momentary freedom from attack to gather together a goodly pile of ammunition—shoes, tennis rackets, pinecones, pillows, and an empty wasp’s nest which Lefkowitz had collected as a specimen. Chink Towner had entrenched himself on the top of a bunk, from which fortified position he was able now and then to swipe the tumbling combatants over the head with a pillow. Little Peter Lister managed to give Fat Crampton a timely shove which sent him rolling between the legs of his battling tent-mates.

Objects of all sorts, from baseball bats to cakes of soap, flew through the air and landed in the low bushes outside the tent. Battle-cries and shouts of the wounded rent the calm Sunday afternoon air.

The fight was no longer a private contest. The action had become general. A whirling shoe had landed on “Kipper” Dabney, aide of Tent Nine next door, and he had immediately led his cohorts in a vengeful sally against their warlike neighbors. Somebody had refilled the empty water-pail and was methodically doing his bit to make sure that not one of the combatants was left undrenched. A scouting party from Tent Five had raced downhill and were swiftly pulling the blankets from every bunk and tossing them into the huckleberry bushes. Tent Ten was a battleground of whirling arms, tumbling bodies, and flying weapons, whereon no one knew his friend, and every boy fought for himself.

“Stop!”

A shrill voice of command cut through the tumult. Unseen by the rioters, a short, erect man in scoutmaster’s uniform had appeared in their midst.

“Stop this at once! Put those things down! Attention!”

A boy on the outskirts of the group whistled in surprise. “Chickie! It’s Mr. Colby!” He dodged behind a tree and disappeared. Silently the boys from other tents faded from the scene, trying to look innocent and peaceful. In ten seconds the members of Tent Ten were left alone amid the ruins, under the stern gaze of Mr. Colby.

“Attention! Line up!”

Eight boys guiltily straightened, heels together.

“You, Utway, drop that baseball bat! Now, what’s the meaning of this?”

The councilor’s keen eyes flashed from one face to the next. The sudden uproar had brought him running from his place at the leaders’ meeting on the porch of the lodge. As officer of the day, it was his duty to take charge of the camp program, inspect the tents, and assign merit points for the conduct of each tent-group. He took his duties most seriously; a short period of service in the National Guard had given him a mighty respect for military discipline; and his strictness at all times was well-known at Lenape.

“Men, you are a disgrace!” he snapped. A few feathers from a ripped pillow sifted down and settled upon the brim of his hat, but not a boy dared to smile. “A disgrace! Now, who’s responsible for this?”

His searching eye caught sight of the twins, standing together at one end of the line. He well knew the reputation these husky brothers had for unladylike conduct, and twice before had found it necessary to separate them from each other’s grasp after sudden tussles. His lips tightened as he stopped before Jerry, whose relinquished baseball bat lay across his feet.

“You again, eh? Fighting with your brother, were you, Jake? Or Jerry, whichever you are?”

“Well, you see——”

“Never mind accusing anybody else! You’ll have to learn that camp is no place for continual bickering! Look at this tent! You’ve made hay of the whole place. I’ll make it my job to see that Tent Ten gets the booby can for this——” The councilor’s words were broken off short, and he fell back, clapping his hands to his head.

He had been standing directly under the front tent pole, and the oil lantern hanging there, which had somehow escaped being brought into the fray, had suddenly descended from its nail at the top of the pole and struck him full on the crown. The blow had been partly dulled by his stiff hat, but he was smarting with anger. His bristling gaze fell on the flushed face of Jake Utway, who stood beside the pole with defiance in his eyes.

“You—you did that, Utway! Don’t deny it!”

Jake did not deny it. He had taken this means of defending his brother from the full brunt of the guilt for the battle-royal.

“Well, why don’t you stop picking on Jerry? He wasn’t the only one to blame! All of us did some.”

“You—you——Both you boys are incorrigible! Now, listen! You two must put this tent in order at once—pick up everything, make all the beds, put everything in its place! If this is not done, I shall recommend that you serve ten hours apiece on the chain gang. No discipline—no discipline——”

Still rubbing his injured brow tenderly, the enraged scoutmaster rushed from the tent, not daring to trust his temper further.

The group relaxed. “Guess that’ll fix you guys for soaking me with all that water,” muttered Sherlock Jones. “Serves you right.”

“Shut up,” said Jerry rudely. “Say, Jake, thanks. He sure did look sad when that lantern bopped him! I knew right away you did it on purpose.”

“Aw, he was picking on you,” answered Jake. “That’s all right. He got even with us, though. It’s not going to be an easy job, cleaning up this mess. Let’s get busy. Come on, pick up those blankets.”

“You’re no cripple—pick ’em up yourself!”

“Pick ’em up, you lazy loafer!”

“Who’s a loafer?”

“You are!”

“You’re another!”

“And you’re his brother!”

The Utway twins were at it again.

CHAPTER II SHERLOCK ON THE TRAIL

Sherlock Jones muttered vengefully to himself as he slowly stripped and removed his sopping clothes after the battle. Moodily he donned a dry outfit, pulled a sweater over his head, and stalked from the littered tent.

Between two pine trees a few yards away, a rustic bench had been built. Sherlock sat down, drew a thin book from his pocket, and began to read. He had barely cast his eye down one page when a shadow fell on his arm, and he looked up to see Wild Willie Sanders surveying him curiously.

“What’s bitin’ you?” asked Wild Willie. “You look mad as a wet hen.”

Sherlock scowled. “Something terrible’s going to happen around this camp!” he said with a profound air of secrecy.

The other boy laughed scornfully. “Huh! That’s what you’re always saying! Always acting mysterious, as if you thought somebody was going to commit a murder any minute! Reading that book again, too, I see! What’s the name of it?”

With a swift movement, he jerked the thin volume from Sherlock’s hand, and read the title. “‘How to Be a Detective in 10 Lessons, by the Fireside Correspondence School.’ Say, what makes you think you’re a natural-born sleuth, anyway?”

Sherlock peered up pleadingly, blinking his pale blue eyes behind the large, window-like lenses of a pair of horn-rimmed glasses that rested on his long, inquisitive nose. “Here, give me that, Wild Willie! Give me back that book!”

“All right, Mr. Detective.” The boy tossed the book down, and grunted. “Say, you better quit shadowing Chink Towner all over the place. He’s getting mad about it, and told me he’d swat you one if you didn’t stop following him.”

Again Sherlock gave him a solemn glance. “Shh! I got information that he’s a smuggler!”

“A smuggler? What do you mean?”

“Well, anyway, he’s probably a Chinese spy in disguise.”

Wild Willie laughed derisively. “Say, I’ve known Chink Towner all my life, and he’s no more a smuggler than the Chief is! Why he’s not even a Chinaman—we just call him Chink because he kind of looks that way. You better get these nutty ideas out of your head before you get hurt. It’s just like that time you told me that Leggy and all the other colored fellows in the kitchen were counterfeiters.”

Sherlock winced. This affair was another of his failures to discover a secret threat of Crime hanging over the heads of his fellow campers. One evening soon after the camp season had started, he had been listening outside the shack where these dusky young men lived, back of the ice-house, and had heard the whirr of machinery and the proud voice of Leggy, assistant cook, remarking: “Yas suh, dis here ma-sheen is sure goin’ to make lots o’ money for us all!” His hope of fame as a great detective was blasted next day in mess-hall, however, when that same Leggy announced that he had “brought a sewing-machine to camp with him and was prepared, for a nominal sum of money, to mend rips and tears in the campers’ clothing.”

“Never mind about that,” he said desperately. “People around this camp are going to be pretty glad they’ve got a live-wire detective on the job. Pretty soon you’ll wish you’d listened to me.”

“Why? What’s going to happen?”

“Some people around here will bear watching, that’s all!” Sherlock cast a meaning glance in the direction of Tent Ten, where the twins had set about clearing up the devastated tent and making up the bunks into a semblance of orderliness.

Wild Willie stared in unbelief, and again broke into a laugh. “You mean the Utway brothers? Say, if you take my advice, you’ll keep away from those two! Everybody knows they scrap with each other now and then, but if you try to tackle one of them, you’ll have both of them coming down on your neck! What have you got against them?”

“Well,” said Sherlock slowly, “Jake threw around my good camera-case, and Jerry dumped a whole bucket of water on me——”

“That’s no crime, is it? What’s mysterious about that?”

“You’ll see. Look at what they did to Mr. Colby—Jake knocked down a lantern on him, on purpose, and I bet they’d like to do worse, if they could. And he’s a councilor!”

“You’re a born chump,” remarked his tent-mate hopelessly. “No use trying to argue with you, Mr. Sherlock Holmes Junior. Some day, something terrible is going to happen around camp, and then you’ll be a hero and discover the mystery. Oh, yes!” Again came that scornful laugh. “Listen, there goes the bugle sounding Recall. Sax McNulty promised to tell some stories before swim, up at the big cherry tree. Are you coming, or are you going to read your old book all day?”

“You go ahead. I’m all right.” Sherlock again picked up his precious book, but he did not read far. As soon as Wild Willie was out of sight, he slipped the book into his pocket. He was convinced that the Utway twins were a pair of villains. If he could catch them in some dark act, and unmask them as dire disturbers of the peace of Camp Lenape——

Already a plan had formed in his mind. He would hide near them, watch their movements, and if possible discover them in some suspicious act.

The campus between the rows of tents was deserted now. Again silence hovered over Camp Lenape, scene of many a summer adventure, some of which have been written down elsewhere. The spreading lodge-building, perched on the hillside midway between the mountain range and the waters of Lake Lenape, was deserted. In the shadow by the kitchen door, Sherlock could see Ellick, the jovial, chocolate-colored chef, sprawled on the ground beside his three coffee-colored assistants, resting after their labors of preparing the midday meal of camp fare. The waiting lad could picture in his mind the scene under the wild-cherry tree in the baseball field beyond the lodge, where a dozen grown men, the councilors, sat, surrounded by the hundred lively boy campers who each season came to live under canvas in the woods and to enjoy the delights of this outdoor paradise. “Sax” McNulty, the comical leader who was in charge of camp stunts, would be relating some stirring tale. All the other councilors would be there—Wally Rawn, the swimmer; Lieutenant Eames of West Point

fame; Mr. Colby; Happy Face Frayne, the associate director; and the rest. And somewhere among the group of listening boys would be the Chief himself, the kindly director who knew all things.

Among the crowd, Sherlock’s absence would not be noticed. He rose swiftly, and managed to creep unseen into a clump of low bushes about fifty yards below Tent Ten. From this vantage-point he was able to overlook the activity of the two brothers, who labored moodily at their task in the hot sun.

It was no easy thing to discover all the missing objects which the energetic raiders from other tents had thrown into the surrounding shrubbery, and to arrange everything inside in apple-pie order for a later inspection; and the better part of an hour passed before Jake and Jerry sat on a newly-made bunk and rested from their labors.

Sherlock, who had patiently squatted within the depths of a distant huckleberry patch all the while, now saw his chance to creep undiscovered to the space under the flooring of the tent, where he could listen and perhaps overhear some incriminating words. Expertly he wormed his way to this hiding-place, behind the unsuspecting backs of the brothers, in time to catch the end of Jake’s last remark.

“—you’re right, Jerry. We sure ought to do something. Everybody was in on the scrap, and Colby didn’t have any right to put all this work on us.”

“He’s too strict, with all his talk about discipline,” responded Jerry somberly. “From now on he’s going to be after us, especially when you pushed the tent-pole and brought that lantern down on his dome; so we might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.”

“That’s the stuff! What’ll we do to him?”

Sherlock, below them, stifled a gasp of horror. Here was mutiny, rank rebellion against the authority of a councilor of Lenape, a grown man and a scoutmaster! His jaw gaped as he listened.

“I’ve been thinking,” said Jerry slowly. “I bet old Colby could be scared out of his skin, even if he was a soldier once. You know that big bull-frog Spaghetti Megaro caught the other day? I know where he keeps it down in my tent. Let’s get it, and to-night, about twelve o’clock when everybody’s asleep, we’ll slide down to Colby’s tent and chuck old Mr. Frog into his bed! Talk about scared! Say, I’ll bet Old Discipline will let out a yelp you can hear a mile!”

“Boy, I can just hear it now!” agreed Jake, bursting into a laugh. “But how are we going to stay awake that long? Twelve o’clock’s pretty late.”

“I’ll fix that. I can wake up whenever I want to, you know. We can run a long string across from my tent over here. Tie one end to your foot before you go to sleep. When I wake up I’ll give it a pull and wake you up, then get the frog, and meet you here. Then we’ll go down to Fifteen and give Mr. Discipline the scare of his life!”

“All set. I got a ball of cord in my locker we can use. Come on, Jerry—we got time enough before swim to listen in on one of Sax McNulty’s stories. Let’s go!”

Day is done, gone the sun,

From the lake, from the hills, from the sky—

The full, rich notes of Taps rolled over the pines of Lenape and echoed across the lake. Fat Crampton doused the Tent Ten lantern and climbed heavily into his creaking bunk.