“I guess you boys are pretty hungry—going without your supper. Trot down to the cook shack and get outside of anything you can find ready-made.”
After they were gone he turned to Goldrick with a slow smile.
“It’s interesting, Goldrick, to notice what odd things jump up in the woods when you haven’t your gun along,” he remarked. “When Mr. Maxwell told me he was going to load these two youngsters on me for the summer—and in this hot fight which I knew well enough was coming—I came mighty near asking him not to. It is rather lucky for us that I didn’t, don’t you think?”
“Rather,” said Goldrick; “I’m saying it, and but for that red-headed boy I might not be here to say it.”
“Yes,” the chief nodded; “that tunnel business was fine. But now to-day; I grant you that it was nothing but sheer boy-curiosity that took those two fellows up on Bull Peak; but there you are—none of the rest of us had the boy-curiosity. And that Donovan lad, with his, ‘it just happened’: if he doesn’t make good all the way along, it won’t be because he doesn’t keep his eyes open and his wits on edge. There are times when he seems years older than he claims to be.”
It was at this precise moment that Larry, out in the cook shack, had just pried open a can of baked beans for Dick and another for himself. And what he was saying sufficiently proved his right and title still to be called a boy.
“Gee-whoosh, Dick!—did you ever taste anything so good as these beans in all your born days? My land! I believe I could eat until I’m like the toad-frog that wanted to swell himself up and be as big as an ox!”
CHAPTER VII
THE UNINVITED SPECIAL
“Doesn’t it beat the everlasting band how little sense some folks have?”