The boys yawningly staggered to the water’s edge and made their toilet in a tin basin, with the scull-boat for a wash-stand. Already the sun was climbing high, and the gnats and flies and all the world of insect and bird were awake. Sam and Joe could be descried at work on their lines, far outside the mouth of the bayou.
Only the three tenants of Camp Grape Arbor were sluggards!
Of these Bob was the friskiest. Ned and Hal, while trying to be good natured, still were very irritable. They were stiff and lame, and spotted with mosquito bites. Their hands were painfully cracked from water and dirt and the oar, and their faces, burned by the sun, felt strangely leathery. Hal’s nose was peeling, and Ned, who foolishly had rolled up his sleeves, was the owner of a huge water blister half way between left wrist and elbow.
However, when they once more were in the boat, and had started for the lines—Bob again remaining alone in camp, a state at which he never failed to protest strongly—their spirits really rose, and they were happy.
“There’s the Harriett!” said Ned, as the mellow whistle of a steamboat signaling for a landing chimed in the distance, over the water.
“Then it must be about eight o’clock!” cried Hal, scandalized. “My! but we’re lazy!”
And to atone for their late rising he dug valiantly with the sculling oar.
Their morning’s haul consisted of five catfish, and, amid great rejoicing, a fine pickerel, for their fish-box; a soft shell turtle, who so easily released his own flapper, and swam off, that Ned declared he was one of the two they had caught yesterday, and was simply making his regular rounds; and a black bass, a mere minnow, whose greediness had led him to take into his mouth more than he could swallow. Him the boys let go, to grow.
As on previous occasions, all the other hooks were as bare of bait as of anything else, and Ned had to scrape together every scrap at hand to rebait them.
Upon their return to camp the hungry boys, with the ever-hungry Bob as assistant, had breakfast. Breakfast consisted of—bacon and potatoes and coffee. The critical Hal insisted that the coffee tasted “froggy”; just the same, he drank it!