“You’ll see, if you come with me. We’ll get away from these babies and have a good time of our own.”
“All right. Hi, Gil!” shouted Blackie, as his patrol-leader passed by. “Where you heading?”
“Up the lake. Say, you remember when we hiked the short way to camp the first night we came up? You remember that house you asked me about? Well, now’s your chance to see it closer. That’s where the hermit lives, and he’s a queer old bird if there ever was one.”
At Gil’s words the picture of that secret, sinister house on the mountainside, as Blackie had first glimpsed it, came back to him.
“That’s right—thanks for reminding me. I’m sorry, Irish—I’ll sneak off with you some other time.”
He slipped away and joined the group around Dr. Cannon, the camp medico, at the lodge steps. There were some fifteen or twenty campers who clamored about the short, sturdy figure of the doctor, deluging him with questions about their destination.
“The old hermit, Rattlesnake Joe, is one of the sights of this part of the country,” he said, quieting them with a gesture. “I don’t need to tell you anything more—you’ll see him for yourselves soon enough. Keep together—forward, march!”
The boys straggled behind him as he led the way around behind the kitchen and the ice-house and on past the Red Cross tent to the road. Blackie marched in company with the Utway twins and a shock-haired “two-striper” nicknamed “Sunfish” because he had once fallen out of a canoe and when he was pulled up on the dock, it was discovered that he had unwittingly trapped a good-sized sunfish in one of the pockets of his sweater.
The hikers turned off to the right where the road turned up the mountain, and headed down a marshy lane bounded with a stone fence on each side. The small, stinging deer-flies swarmed about their heads, and Jerry Utway, one of the twins, showed Blackie how to fasten a handkerchief around his head so that it would flutter and keep the bothersome insects at a distance.
“See that tree?” asked the Sunfish.