The same response followed.
“It is because you have been hunting for something which doesn’t exist; there is no animal’s trail within a hundred yards of this spot.”
Scout Master Hall made no further effort to restrain his merriment. He turned partly on one side and laughed till he nearly fell off the boulder. Uncle Elk’s shoulders bobbed up and down and from behind the thicket of snow white whiskers issued sounds such as are made by water gurgling from the mouth of a bottle. The scouts like sensible lads enjoyed the joke none the less because they were the victims. They slapped one another on the shoulder, several flung up their hats and shouted, and two of them gave a fine imitation of a Scotchman dancing the Highland Fling.
As might be expected, Mike Murphy was the first to regain his wits. The tempest of jollity had hardly passed, when he said:
“It minds me of the time when I was snoring on board the launch Deerfut, draaming of watermelons and praties, whin a spalpeen, without asking me permission, picked me up and flung me overboard where the water was ’leven miles deep and I had niver swum a stroke in me life.”
“Did you drown?” asked Isaac Rothstein in pretended dismay.
“I s’pose I oughter done so, but I changed me mind and swum to shore.”
(You will recall that, incredible as this may sound, it is precisely what occurred.)
“I don’t see the similarity between that incident and this,” remarked Chester Haynes.
“For the raison that there isn’t any, which is why I call it to mind. Don’t ye obsarve that ye have been looking fur that which isn’t, as Uncle Elk has explained, and which is the same in me own case? The stoopidity of some folks is scand’lous, as Mickey Shaughnessy said whin his taycher expicted him to know how much two and two make whin the same are added togither.”