Dirk stretched out his aching body, and closed his eyes. Through the dark drifted the vengeful tones of his enemy.
“All right! But anyway, he’s a tattle-tale, and I’ll fix him for it—you see if I don’t!”
The morning period of camp duty found Brick Ryan on the wood-pile, serving his time chopping sawn logs into stove lengths and vowing vengeance upon the boy who had brought the punishment on him. He looked darkly from time to time toward the rear door of the camp kitchen, where the rest of the Tent One campers were helping to make the ice-cream for the Sunday dinner. Among them lounged Dirk Van Horn, who now and then lent a hand at the job of turning the heavy churn in the freezer, or packed some more salted ice around the revolving container. Brick noted that his foe was now dressed in garments more suited to a Lenape camper—basketball shorts and a light, sleeveless shirt. If Van Horn didn’t watch out, Brick mused, he would be laid up with a bad case of sunburn, for his shoulders were pale and lacked the protective coat of tan that marked the boys who had already spent a month in the mountain sunshine.
“Some people never learn,” Brick muttered, viciously splitting a stick of smooth birchwood. “Runnin’ home to mama just because we was havin’ a little fun with him, and squealin’ to Sax so he’d make me do wood-pile duty! Well, all I can say is, my time will come yet!”
He was interrupted by the noisy clatter of the motor of the camp flivver which, driven by Mr. Lane, rattled down the road and drew up at the rear of the lodge. In the back of the small truck, tightly lashed to prevent jolting, was a long, curved object wrapped securely in burlap. As Brick watched, Dirk Van Horn gave a shout and ran to the driver, who was just descending.
“That’s my canoe you have there, isn’t it, sir? Listen—doesn’t it say it’s for Van Horn? That’s me!”
“Yes, it’s for you, I guess,” answered Lane; “and the dickens of a time I had bringing it over these roads up from Elmville. We’ve got plenty of canoes here at camp—what any boy wants with one all to himself, I don’t know.”
Dirk was not listening. He ran to the group around the ice-cream freezer, and summoned them excitedly.
“Come on, you chaps! I made my father buy me a new canoe because I promised to come to camp, and here it is! Help me unpack it, and then we’ll try it out. It’s a beauty!”
“Listen!” Lefty Reardon protested. “We’re on squad duty—we have to make this ice-cream, and if we go away now, it won’t freeze——”