“Oh! well, sir,” he went on to say, “I don’t want to accuse any one, you understand, and right now I’m not hinting that Nat had a hand in those thefts; but you see they think we suspect them, and that makes it disagreeable here for them.”
“To tell the truth,” said Elmer Jones, “I never thought they’d tag along with us up here, in a regularly organized Y. M. C. A. camp, because they’re always in fear of being lectured on account of their ways. But they came, and now they feel uneasy when this queer mystery is afoot.”
“We mustn’t make them feel that they are suspected,” said the minister. “So far they seem to have behaved themselves fairly well, and I have been allowing myself to hope that by degrees those boys may see that it pays to be decent. I would like to show them that there’s more genuine fun to be gotten out of the clean method of living than in the way they’ve usually carried on. Besides, we mustn’t forget that none of those boys has the best of home influences back of him.”
“There comes the boat with the bass fishermen!” called Dan just then, as a shout was heard from the water.
“They act as if they had met with at least fair success,” said Mr. Holwell, who could read boys like the printed page of a book, though for all that he confessed that he found something new every day to study in their make-up.
“And unless my eyes are deceiving me,” remarked Harry Bartlett, “there’s the other boat pushing out from the shore across the lake.”
“Just what it is,” added Clint Babbett, who possessed keen vision. “And say! let me tell you they’ve got a load of stuff along with them. Must have about cleaned that farmer out of eatables.”
There was more or less excitement as the boats came in, one after the other. The fishermen had succeeded beyond their most ardent expectations, and showed a splendid catch of bass, several of which exceeded in weight the largest taken on the preceding day.
When those from the second boat landed they proudly exhibited the results of their visit to the farm. There was butter, beautiful golden in color, and many dozens of eggs, some of them from ducks, though it was pretty late in the summer for these fowls to be laying, Mr. Holwell observed.
“And here’s six of the finest spring chickens you ever saw,” said Phil Harkness, one of the foragers, exultantly. “They had just fixed them for market, and were only too glad to sell them to us.”