Then he gave a whoop of delight. The little lever of the lens had been pulled down.
Carefully he took the camera out of its hiding place among the branches, and turned the roll so that a new film was exposed. He knew from the numbers on the little peekhole that there were three more exposures on the roll, and so to use them up, rather than develop them blank, he snapped the brush lean-to from three different positions, thinking that the folks at home would be interested in seeing what kind of a place they lived in while in the forests.
Then pocketing his camera, he cast a last look around the lean-to and set out for the village and Aunt Abbie’s house.
He had gone less than five hundred yards when the sky began to darken, and in a few minutes the big rain drops were pattering down through the branches of the trees.
“Well, I’ll be jiggered,” he muttered aloud. “If Aunt Abbie wasn’t right. Believe me, next time I want to know what the weather is, I’m going to hunt me up a cat and observe his actions for awhile. I’m due for a nice wetting now.”
He wound a large bandanna handkerchief around his neck to keep out the wet, and pulled his coat collar up. Then he broke into a long lope, that would take him over the ground at a fair rate of speed, and yet not be tiring.
The rain increased in force, and soon he was pretty thoroughly drenched. He wished he had his rubber poncho with him, but that was strapped to his knapsack, safely tucked away at Denton’s store, nearly four miles away. There was nothing to do but get wet, thought Dick philosophically, and he put his best food forward. He had cheerful visions of Aunt Abbie’s warm house and a good hot supper, for the rain was cooling off the heated air like so many monster electric fans.
He reached Denton’s store at last, and getting his knapsack and refusing the postmaster’s invitation to stay and get dry, made his way to Aunt Abbie’s.
“Good land o’ liberty,” said the old lady, when she saw Dick’s condition. “Come right out to the kitchen stove, and get those wet things off. Lucky there’s some old clothes belonging to my youngest son upstairs, and you can put ’em on till yours get dry.”
Dick protested that he wanted nothing more than a chair by the stove, for a wetting more or less was nothing to him; but the old lady wouldn’t hear of it, and to humor her, Dick told her to go and get the clothes and he would wear them.