They shook hands heartily. They had not been on intimate terms since Johnson moved out of his room, but here in the woods everything seemed different. Everyone was intimate with everyone else there.
“Well, how did you get wet?” Scott asked.
“You see in me, my friend,” Johnson orated, striking an imposing attitude, “the victim of mob violence. A peaceful citizen martyred to the ancient and dishonorable custom of compulsory immersion. I was duly baptized in my infancy, but your honorable associates here thought that it did not take and repeated the dose. In plain language, they threw me in the lake.”
Johnson had the happy faculty of making capital out of everything that happened to him and he now moved gayly away with the crowd as solidly a member of the “gang” as though he had been there all the summer. He inspected the premises with the air of a proprietor and by evening was familiar with every detail of the camp. He jollied the cook, made friends with all the children on the place and arranged a four-day fishing trip with the postmaster a mile up the lake, because, as he explained to the other fellows, that gentleman had the only supply of angle worms in that section of the country.
That evening around the campfire he threw the crew into convulsions with a dramatic account of the conversation he had heard in Park Rapids between the express agent and an irate fisherman.
“I tell you there isn’t anything for you,” said the agent.
“But I tell you there must be,” the fisherman retorted. “They were shipped from Wadena two days ago.”
“Was it a box?” the agent asked, looking over the waybills once more.
“Yes,” snapped the fisherman, “and if it has been lost I’ll sue the company. I’m not going to have a week’s pleasure spoiled for nothing.”
“Well, there’s nothing here,” the agent answered doggedly.