Tom and Bob had a mere speaking acquaintance with him, as they all attended the same school at home,—from which, however, Harvey was more often truant than present. Beyond that association they had nothing to do with him. There were four members of the yacht’s crew, although that term was applied by the people of the town to some dozen or more boys. Of these four, Joe Hinman was a thin, hatchet-faced, shrewd-looking boy, whose father was employed by a railroad in some capacity that kept him much away from home; George Baker and Allan Harding were cousins, whose parents had a rather doubtful reputation, as dealers in second-hand goods and articles pawned, at a little shop in an obscure quarter of the town. Tim Reardon had no parents that he knew of, and earned an uncertain living, doing chores and working at odd jobs through the winter. In the summer, he was usually to be found aboard Harvey’s yacht, where he was fairly content to do the drudgery, for the sake of the livelihood and the fun of yachting and camping. It was not the sort of companionship that a wise and careful parent would have chosen for his son, but they sufficed for Harvey, and no one interfered with him. These boys did as he said, and that was what he wanted. Nearly every one in the entire village had gone down to Harvey’s camp in the next hour following the explosion. Curiously enough, however, Henry Burns was not of this number. He had jumped out of bed at the crash and the shock, and had hastily dressed and rushed down-stairs, ready to go with the crowd. For once, however, Mrs. Carlin got ahead of him. “Why, Henry Burns,” she had exclaimed, catching sight of him as he dodged out of the door. “Where do you think you are going at this hour of the night, and you that was feeling so bad only a few hours ago. You’re not going off through those woods to-night, not if I know it. You can just take yourself back to bed, if you don’t want to be laid up with a sick spell.” And Henry Burns, now that attention was thus publicly attracted to him, did not dare to steal out later and join the others, lest Mrs. Carlin should hear of it, and, perchance, become suspicious of him. So he went back unwillingly to bed, but not to sleep. He was wide-awake when the angry party returned. Listening from his window, he heard their description of the explosion and their impudent reception by Harvey’s crew; and proceeded to draw his own conclusion from it all. The more he thought of it, the more his suspicion grew that, in some way, Tom or Bob, or both, had had a hand in the thing. Tom, indeed, had expressed his intention to Henry Burns of spying on the camp in his hunt to find the missing box; and, although it seemed a most unlikely hour for him to have gone down there, Henry Burns wisely conjectured that that was what he must have done.