“Don’t stop on my account!” snapped the heavy-weight, over his shoulder. “Get it out of your system and maybe you’ll feel better.”
“I won’t feel better until you get the engine started, so we won’t have to stay out in this broiling sun. And to think there’s a fine feed waiting us at the other end of the lake if we could only get to it! I should have thought you’d have had common sense enough, Bob, where the eats were concerned, to make sure of getting to them.”
“Say! Look here!” and Bob turned fiercely on his tormentor. He tried to seem angry but the effect of a smudge of oil on one cheek, with a daub of black grease on the end of his nose, while one eye appeared as though it had come off second best in a fistic encounter, caused his two companions to laugh, which altogether spoiled the effect of the vigorous protest on which the youth had started.
“How did I know this was going to happen?” he asked, waving a grimy hand at the engine, while, with the other, he beat a tattoo with a monkey wrench on the nearest cylinder. “Could I tell she was going to break down as soon as we got out in the middle of the lake?”
“Break down nothing!” scoffed Ned. “You’re out of gasoline, that’s what’s the matter. You didn’t have sense enough to see that the tank was full before you started.”
“Huh! I s’pose you never overlook a little matter like that?” sneered Bob.
“Of course not,” and, having spoken thus loftily, not to say superciliously, Ned turned away and gazed across the blue waters of Lake Carmona, now sparkling and rather uncomfortably hot under the June sun.
“Guess you don’t remember the time you invited the girls out in the car and got stalled on Mine hill just because of the same little old fact that you forgot the gas?” asked Bob. “How about that?”
“There was a leak in the tank,” defended Ned.
“It takes you to tell it.”