The two boys trotted on along the trail at a fast pace. Blackie would have liked to ask some more questions about the hermit who lived alone in the woods in that mysterious house, but he was afraid that Gil would taunt him about being a greenhorn, so he saved his breath for running. The trail soon broke surprisingly into the campus, and they were among white tents where several of their comrades, already arrived in camp by the same short-cut around the lake, were busily spreading out their blankets on the two-decked canvas bunks that lined the tent walls.
“The tent assignments must be already posted,” muttered Gil. “Hurry up to the lodge!”
Blackie ran with him through the little tent-village, but when he reached the flagpole before the spreading lodge he halted as the lake and the far shore spread out before his view.
“Jee-miny!” he whistled. He could see the roof of the boat dock below, around which were moored about a dozen broad-beamed steel rowboats.
Gil Shelton came tearing by, laden with blanket and duffle that he had collected from the pile of baggage on the lodge porch.
“Say, Blackie,” he called, “you better get on the job! You’re assigned to Tent Four, down there. Grab your stuff and hurry down. The first one in the tent gets his choice of bunks.”
Several boys, the advance guard of the hay-wagons, came streaming down to the campus from the road behind the lodge. Blackie climbed the steps to the lodge porch and in the welter of luggage there discovered a familiar-looking sea-bag with his initials painted on it in black. Seizing this dunnage, he ran stumbling to Tent Four, his new home in the woods.
Tent Four lay at the end of the row of tents topmost on the hilly campus. Before it lay a cleared space dotted by huckleberry bushes and a few shading pines. The tent was floored and painted a battleship gray, and eight canvas bunks lined the walls, running the length of the tent and making two tiers. A tall boy was already swiftly and smoothly making up a bed in one of the lower bunks. He nodded to Blackie but did not pause in his work.
Gil Shelton shouted across from Tent Three, next door. His bunk was already made. With the deftness of an experienced camper, he was setting each thing in its correct place—shoes and hats in a line under the bed, coats and sweaters on the rope swung between the two tent-poles, pajamas under his pillow, and the remainder of his kit in one of the pine-wood lockers that ran down the middle of the tent.
“The bottom bunks are the best, Blackie! If you pick a top one, the fellow under you gets you up in the morning by the airplane method!”