“Never mind. Don’t call him names. He can’t help it,” said Madge.
Helen giggled again. Tom had darted back to rouse his chum. Bob Steele appeared, more tousled and more sleepy-looking than Tom.
“What’s the matter with that fellow now?” he grumbled. “He’s like a flea–you never know where he’s going to be next! Ha! he’ll fall off that and break his silly neck.”
And as Busy Izzy was just then nearest his end of the hall in his strange gyrations, Bob Steele stepped forward and grabbed him, lifting him bodily off the balustrade. Busy Izzy screeched, but Tom clapped a hand over his mouth.
“Shut up! want to raise the whole neighborhood?” grunted Bobbins, dragging the lightly attired, struggling boy back into their room. “Ha! I’ll fix you after this. I’ll lash you to the bedpost every night we’re here–now mark that, young man!”
It seemed that the youngster often walked in his sleep, but the girls had not known it. Usually, at school, his roommates kept the dormitory door locked and the key hidden, so that he couldn’t get out to do himself any damage running around with his eyes shut.
The party all got to sleep again after that and there was no further disturbance before morning. They made a good deal of fun of Isadore at the breakfast table, but he took the joking philosophically. He was always playing pranks himself; but he had learned to take a joke, too.
He declared that all he dreamed during the night was that he was wrecked in an iceboat on Second Reef and that the only way for him to get ashore was to walk on a cable stretched from the wreck to the beach. He had probably been walking that cable–in his mind–when Ruth had caught him balancing on the balustrade.
The strange girl who persisted in calling herself “Nita” came down to the table in some of Heavy’s garments, which were a world too large for her. Her own had been so shrunk and stained by the sea-water that they would never be fit to put on again. Aunt Kate was very kind to her, but she looked at the runaway oddly, too. Nita had been just as uncommunicative to her as she had been to the girls in the bedroom the night before.
“If you don’t like me, or don’t like my name, I can go away,” she declared to Miss Kate, coolly. “I haven’t got to stay here, you know.”