"If anybody threw it, you did yourself, Step Hen," asserted Giraffe, not liking this thing of being accused of things promiscuously; "because I saw something that looked mighty much like a shoe, in your hand when you crawled out."
"Then why didn't, you tell me about it, Giraffe?" complained the other, with a doleful groan. "I think you're about as mean as you can be, to let a poor fellow in his excitement do such a thing."
"Why, however was I to know?" said the tall scout, chuckling as though it struck him as a joke that Step Hen, in his sudden anxiety to scare the prowler away, should have thrown his own shoe at the cat. "Besides, I had troubles of my own, just about that time, let me tell you. But mebbe you can find your old shoe again; because the water ain't so very deep up ahead there."
"No need to bother," sang out Bumpus, who was taking his trout down tenderly, and examining it to see how much damage the claws of the intruder had done, if any, "because there the shoe is right now, on shore, and all right."
That gave Step Hen reason to say he knew he could never have been silly enough to cast his shoe in such a way as to hurl it overboard; but all the same he was pleased to be able to recover it in a dry condition, after all.
"Who'll clean it while I get a fire started ashore?" asked Giraffe, presently, when they had finished their dressing.
"No hurry," remarked Thad; "for while the sun's getting ready to come up, and the storm petered out after all, I guess the lake's a bit too rough for us to go out for some time yet. Such a big body of water can kick up some sea when it gets in the humor; and some of the party don't seem to hanker after that rising and falling motion."
Bumpus himself decided to do the last honors to his "noble capture," and taking the fish ashore, with a hunting knife that had a keen edge, he looked for a good place to sit down, on a rock bordering the little beach. Here he kept industriously at work for quite some time.
Meanwhile the fire was a big success, for Giraffe certainly was a marvel when it came to knowing all there was about making them. He had found just the finest hole to serve as the bed of his cooking fire, where a body of red embers would after a little while invite them to place their frying-pan and coffee-pot on the iron grating they carried for the purpose, and which was really the gridiron-like contrivance belonging to a cast-off stove's oven.
"I say, Thad!" Bumpus was heard calling, after he had had plenty of time to finish his job with the trout.