Three minutes later Mark came running after them, still bareheaded.
"Hello!" exclaimed the lad who had asked Chatz for the time, and who seemed to bear the earmarks of a leader among them, as Elmer Chenowith really was, being at the head of the Wolf Patrol, and accredited as an assistant scout master in the Hickory Ridge Boy Scout Troop—"How about this, Mark; where's your cap?"
"Couldn't find it, that's all," laughed the other, good naturedly; "perhaps it went into the river. Anyhow, it's getting that dark I couldn't see the thing, and as you fellows were in such a raging hurry I just gave it up."
"Oh, say, that's too bad," declared Chatz; "I'll turn back with you, Mark, if you give the word."
"Oh, shucks! it isn't worth it, Chatz, though I'm just as much obliged to you as if we went. It's an old cap, anyhow, and even if it went sailing down the Sunflower it wouldn't matter much. I've got another besides my campaign hat. And if it doesn't rain in the morning I may take a run over here on my wheel. Move along, fellows; I can just imagine I smell that bully good supper that's being kept for me at our house."
"Yum, yum, that strikes me," exclaimed Landy, whose one weakness was a love for eating, despite his declaration to the effect that he was daily cutting down his rations in order to reduce his girth. "And I happen to know they're having fried eggplant to-night. If there's one thing I just like above every other dish it's fried eggplant, and plenty of it. Aw!" and he sighed to think that a whole mile still lay between himself and that beloved delicacy.
"All I can say is, that it's mighty lucky we don't have a meeting to-night, that's what," remarked Chatz; "because we'd never be able to get there after this long hike. But, honest, fellows, I think it paid. I never had more fun pulling out black bass than to-day. And whew, how they do fight up here! Why, down in the warmer waters of my state, South Carolina, we have the big-mouth bass, which the natives call green trout, and he comes in as logy as an old piece of tree stump, after about one little tussle."
"But I reckon there are heaps of game fighters up in that old pond at Munsey's mill," remarked Lil Artha.
"There may be, if those fish pirates left any," declared Mark. "You know the game and fish warden found and destroyed a lot of nets, even if he didn't get the Italian poachers. But that's too far away from home, anyway; and I think we'll have to leave the bass that live in that pond to the ghost of the haunted mill."
A general laugh followed this declaration. The scouts had recently been on a long tramp to the mill in question, an abandoned place which was shunned by all the country people for certain causes. But while they had met with sundry adventures of considerable importance while there, none of them could claim to have run across the ghost said to be in charge of the old rookery.