“Oh, Tubby!” he cried. “Lend me half a dollar; will you? I must have that.”
Tubby looked at him out of heavy-lidded eyes, and croaked: “Snow again, brother; I don’t get your drift!”
When Ferd went from one to the other of his mates they all refused–if not quite as slangily as the fat youth, Ferd found himself actually a pauper, with all lines of credit shut to him. It made him serious.
“If all you fellows, and the old prof., should suddenly die on me up here–what would I do?” gasped Ferd. “Why–I’d have to walk home!”
“Or swim,” said Dave, heartlessly. “You’d pawn your canoe, I s’pose.”
Speaking of swimming, that was an art in which several of the boys, as well as Bessie Lavine and Mina Everett, needed practice. Beside the early morning dip, both clubs often held swimming matches either at Green Knoll Camp, or off the boys’ camp on Gannet Island.
The boys built a good diving raft and anchored it in deep water after much hard work. The good swimmers among the girls–especially Wyn and Grace–liked to paddle over to the raft and dive from it.
Late in the afternoon the Go-Aheads had come to the raft in their canoes dressed only in their bathing suits, and found that the boys had gone off on some excursion, and that even Professor Skillings was not in sight at Cave-in-the-Wood Camp.
“Oh, goody!” exclaimed Bess, with satisfaction. “Now we can have a good time without those trifling boys bothering us. I’m going to learn to dive properly, Wyn.”
“Sure,” returned her friend and captain, encouragingly. “Now’s the time,” and she gave Bess a good deal of attention for some few minutes.