“Why, Steve, I didn’t give you credit for being so sensible,” Henry observed. “I didn’t believe you were studious enough to carry a pencil.”
“Oh,” Charles ingeniously replied, “Steve doesn’t carry a pencil for studious purposes; I doubt whether he ever takes notes; but whenever he finds a clean and smooth surface,—such as a new shingle or a solid fence built of newly planed boards,—he draws his name, or a mythological figure, or the Phantom Ship, on it, with dazzling flourishes.”
“Draws his name, eh?” asked Henry.
“Exactly.”
“Well,” sighed Steve, “it is one of the few things I can do well.”
With that he took out his penknife.
He was not the only one that had found one of the little tubes. For some minutes Jim had been silently filling his coat pocket with them, intending to take them home. It is not easy for us to guess his object in doing this, but perhaps the poor fellow, despairing of shooting anything, wished to bear away some trophy, or souvenir, of this hunt.
George, seeing all this, and that his proffered explanation was contemptuously rejected, resolved to make an “analysis;” but, acting on the spur of the moment, he went about it in a very puerile way. He set one of the mysterious little tubes on a flat stone, then seized a smaller stone, and prepared to grind his particular tube to powder.
Truly, here was Genius laboring under difficulties! Here was a scientific philosopher endeavoring to solve the appalling mystery by utterly annihilating a tube! But his hand was so unsteady with the awfulness of the revelations he was about to make that (fortunately for him) his first blow overshot the mark, and he paused before aiming a second.
Meanwhile Mr. Lawrence, Charles, and Will, expostulated in vain. Henry, not dreaming of danger, looked on with great curiosity, and was almost tempted to examine some of the mysterious little tubes for himself.