“But, Father,” cried Perry, “you haven’t told me what the dragon really was!”
“I didn’t know, myself, for a few minutes,” was the reply. “I dropped in my tracks, right there. A couple of the fellows picked me up, though, as soon as I began to feel a little less faint, and the three of us, waiting until we were sure that the monster was quite dead, went up close to him. I had noticed, in a dim kind of way, that the dragon’s scales looked queer and that some of them had been scraped off on the floor of the cave. But when we got right up to him, what do you suppose we found those scales were?”
“I haven’t the ghost of an idea,” the boy answered expectantly.
“They were made of the silver paper that comes wrapped around bars of chocolate.”
“What?”
“Just plain silver paper.”
“It was the other gang, then—” suggested Perry, seeing a clue.
“That’s just what it was, the other gang.”
“Then it was a fake dragon!” cried the boy, disappointed. “You said it was alive!”
“Does my arm look as if the beast hadn’t been alive?” retorted his father. “It was a mighty lucky thing for me it wasn’t any more alive than I found it!”