“Keep it out of sight—you’ve got the chance to get to the flagpole!”
Blackie nodded and went out on the path. The stars were like bright candles against a blue-green silk dome, and somehow their twinkling was not so pleasant now. He passed a line of tents, some quiet, one or two filled with low snickers and cackles and the usual disturbance of the first night under canvas. The white lodge showed pale and strange in the starlight; the campus was somehow changed from what it had been in bright day. He stumbled across to the base of the flagpole and began spreading out his bed on the hard ground. He cleared away one or two stones, and beat down the high grass as best he could, and tried to rearrange his blankets into comfortable shape.
His next care was to examine the bundle that Slater had passed to him. As he had guessed, it was the missing nightgown that Guppy had bewailed at bedtime. He chuckled, thinking of the scheme that Slater had suggested.
He looked around; the coast was clear. The flagpole was only a few steps away. He jumped up, unfastened the halyards, and knotting a sleeve to each end of the rope, hauled away. Then, almost too sleepy to care where he lay, he crawled into his twisted bed and was dead to the world in half a minute, smiling to think that when the morning sun rose over Camp Lenape, it would reveal that the campers had slept under a fluttering ensign that was nothing more than little Guppy’s pink nightgown.
CHAPTER IV
A HARD CASE
Blackie was wakened somewhat rudely the next morning. A sloshing glass of cold water landed on his face, and he jumped up half-awake to find Gil Shelton standing over him in the fresh sunlight with the empty glass in his hand.
“Rise and shine!” called the patrol-leader. “First Call will sound in about a minute. Gee, you must have been sawing wood not to hear the noise the gang has been making ever since four o’clock this morning! Most of the tenderfeet woke up early and have been horsing around. I couldn’t sleep, so Chink Towner and Spaghetti Megaro and I got permission to hike down to the cottage and back. Look at the big frog we found by the brook!”
He held up a monstrous bullfrog by the hind legs, so close to Blackie’s face that he jumped backwards in alarm, while Gil’s two companions laughed.
“Don’t let him scare you,” said Megaro, the Italian boy.
“I ain’t afraid. Say, what are you going to do with him, Gil?”