“Well, what if it is?” asked the stout lad. “I guess you fellows are as fond of eating as I am, when it comes to that.”
“Sure we are, Bob,” spoke Ned. “Now let’s talk of where we can go.”
“Maybe we’d better wait and see where the professor thinks is the most likely place to find the two-tailed lizard,” suggested Jerry. “It doesn’t make much difference to us where we go, and it does to him.”
“That’s right,” chimed in Ned. “We’ll have a talk with him.”
But it was some time before the boys had a chance to carry out their plans, and talk with the professor, for, from the moment they had seen him in consultation with the foreman in the swamp, there set in such a chain of old happenings as the boys had never known. And these took the professor out of communication for a considerable period.
“I can’t see what keeps Dr. Snodgrass,” said Mrs. Hopkins to Jerry, some hours after her son, and the other boys, had returned from the river. “He never stayed out as late as this before.”
“Not unless he was after specimens that fly after dark,” agreed Jerry.
The scientist had not been home all that afternoon. Jerry told of having seen him in the swamp, though they did not stop to speak to him. Now it was after supper, and dark, and he had not returned to the Hopkins home, where he was a guest.
“I wonder if I’d better get the boys and go out after him?” mused Jerry. “That swamp is a bad place to be lost in.”