"You bet he has. And what he says he means. And it's not healthy for anybody to do a thing when he says 'don't.'"
"Why not?" queried Master Fred.
Pee Wee grinned. "You try it if you like," he said. "Then you'll find out. Dr. Raymond says experience is the surest, if not the best, teacher."
The dormitory was a big, light room, cheerfully furnished, with a locker beside each bed for the boy's clothes and personal possessions, and a chair at the head of the bed.
That wall-space over the heads of the beds was considered the private possession of each couple, for the flaunting of banners, photographs, strings of birds-eggs, shells, pine-cone frames, and a hundred other objects of virtu dear to boyish hearts.
"You see, we can hang up a lot of stuff, too, when our trunks come," whispered Fred to Bobby, pointing to the blank spaces over their beds, lettered only with the names: "Blake" and "Martin."
"You can see clear across the lake from the window here," drawled Pee Wee, lolling on a sill.
The chums came to see. Lake Monatook was spread before them—a beautiful, oval sheet of water, with steep, wooded banks in the east, and sloping yellow beaches of sand at the other end.
Where the Rockledge School stood, a steep sandstone cliff dropped right down to a narrow beach, more than fifty feet below. A strong, two-railed fence guarded the brink of this cliff the entire width of the school premises, save where the stairs led down to the boat-house.
In the middle of the lake were several small islands, likewise wooded. The lake was quite ten miles long, and half as wide in its broadest part.