I laughed fit to split. There ain’t a better way of getting on the blind side of a man than to ’most laugh yourself sick when he makes a joke. I did my duty nobly, if I do say it myself, and it wasn’t much of a joke to laugh at, either.
“Who you spring-boardin’ with?” I snickered; and then I made a sort of joke of my own. “That sounds like you was stoppin’ at a swimmin’-hole, don’t it? Spring-boardin’?”
He laughed, and after that I wasn’t worrying much. If ever you get in a tight place with a man just laugh at something funny he says and make him laugh at something funny you say, and the worry’s over. Somehow you can’t get to suspecting a fellow you’ve been laughing with.
“Where d’you live?” he asked me.
I jerked my thumb over my shoulder. “Back there a piece,” I said, which was true, all right. But it was quite a piece—five miles or more.
When I was done trimming my frog club I shut my jack-knife and, when Batten wasn’t looking, dropped it on the ground near the tree where I knew I could find it again. Then we started to walk up the road toward Willis’s.
We walked along quite a ways until we’d got so far I judged Mark and Sammy would have had time to get well out of sight. Then I began feeling around in my pockets and looked worried. “I dropped my jack-knife somewheres,” I told him. “I bet it was under that tree.”
I felt through my pockets some more, but of course it wasn’t there. “I’m goin’ back,” I says. “That was a new knife, and I can’t afford to lose it.”
“No, I s’pose not,” he says. “Well, good-by. If you get any frogs bring ’em to me at the next house. I’ll pay you ten cents a dozen for good ones.”
I didn’t wait, but started running back as if I was anxious about my knife. I was anxious, all right, but the knife hadn’t anything to do with it. By the time I got to the tree Batten was out of sight around the bend of the road, so I went right to the bank and looked over. Mark and Sammy were gone. I whistled the Ku Klux Klan whistle, and got an answer from out toward the river where Sammy and Mark had pulled the boat and hidden it in the reeds. As soon as they saw me they knew it was safe, and came pulling in to the rail fence again.