“It sure did make Brick sit up and take notice,” chuckled Jerry. “But why didn’t you make up with him afterward?”
“It’s not so easy. He hazed me pretty badly last night, and I’m not done with him yet.”
“But Brick is a pretty good fellow when you get to know him. Why don’t you——” Jerry broke off, and cocked his ear as bugle-notes rattled down from the porch of the lodge. “Say, we better hurry—there goes Church Call.” He glanced with amusement at the battered features and wet, stained garments of the boy at his side. “Gosh, you sure are a sight! You and Brick Ryan will look like a swell pair, sitting on a bench together at church this morning!”
Dirk was quite late for church. He went to the empty tent, washed, and changed his wet clothing for garments more suitable for Sunday service; and the hour of camp worship was more than half over by the time he slipped into a log seat in the woodland chapel overlooking the lake. Brick was down at the front with the rest of the complement of Tent One, but did not turn his head. One or two boys near by looked at Dirk’s marked face curiously, and Jake Utway once caught his eye, winked, and grinned from behind a hymn-book.
During the bountiful Sunday dinner in the lodge, Dirk, sitting with his councilor on one side of him and Nig Jackson on the other, intercepted many inquiring glances directed from neighboring tables toward himself and Brick Ryan. The red-headed boy, for his part, ate with his head down, saying nothing. If Sax McNulty had heard of the fight, he gave no sign.
When dessert was served, Sax looked whimsically at the plate of ice-cream before him.
“Your consciences ought to hurt you slackers,” he observed. “If Lefty hadn’t stuck to his guns, the camp would be missing their ice-cream today, all right. I’ve never had my squad sneak out on a job before. What do you fellows think about it?”
Dirk Van Horn felt the leader’s eyes upon him. He flushed and tried to look unconcerned; but the ice-cream, for some reason, stuck in his throat, and he soon pushed the plate away, to melt into a shapeless mass.
When the time came for announcements, Dr. Cannon, who was officer of the day, awarded the pennant for highest points in inspection to Wally Rawn’s tent; then, with a grin, marched over to the Tent One table and, amid the good-natured jeers of the assembled campers, presented a different sort of emblem. It was a big tin oil-can, across which was printed in white letters: “Booby.”
“Tent One wins the Goof Loving Cup,” the doctor announced with a flourish, “for being lowest in honor points for today. And the first shall be last!”