“Well, I think that is more likely to be right than that they are trying to utilize the clay itself,” went on the professor. “I am sorry, boys, but—Oh, there’s one of those queer green flies I’ve been trying so long to capture. One moment, Mrs. Hopkins. He is on your dress! Please don’t move, and I’ll have him!” and with that, dismissing from his mind, for the moment, all thoughts of the clay the professor “concentrated” on the fly in question.
He stole softly up to the side of Jerry’s mother, and, with a little net, which was never absent from him, Mr. Snodgrass made a neat capture of the buzzing insect.
“Ah, there you are, my beauty!” he exclaimed, as he clapped the fly into a small wire box. It was anything but a beauty, being very large, with a green body, and unpleasantly mottled wings—a vicious-appearing fly. But to the professor it was beautiful from a scientific standpoint.
“A rare insect!” he murmured, holding the wire box up to the light to examine his catch more closely. “A rare find. This has been a lucky day for me.”
“And an unlucky one for us,” remarked Jerry, disconsolately, as he tossed the lump of clay out of the window.
“Maybe someone else could give you another opinion about it, Jerry,” suggested Bob, as the three chums went out. They knew it was of little use to question the professor further. He had given his ultimatum, and, besides, he would be so interested now in his new specimen—preserving it and making notes about it—that he would find time for nothing else.
“No, I’m not going to bother any more about it,” declared Jerry. “The professor evidently knows what he’s talking about. I guess I was on a wrong lead. Those fellows must have been telling the truth, though it didn’t seem so. I was foolish to dream that the clay could be valuable. I guess mother will have to sell the swamp land as a bog tract and nothing else. Come on, let’s go for a spin in the car.”
“Maybe it’ll do him good,” whispered Bob to Ned, while their tall chum was filling the gasoline tank from a supply in the garage. “He sure has got the blues.”
“That’s right,” agreed Ned. “We don’t often see Jerry that way, either. His mother must have lost considerable money, and he depended on the swamp land to make up the shortage. Well, it’s too bad!”
“That’s what it is!”