And presently he went sound asleep.
When he awoke he did not know where he was, and lay for a moment trying to place himself. It came to him with a jolt. The chamber was dark, and even outside Fatty could see that the sky was grey with the dusk of night falling. Cramming his cap on his head, he flung himself at the opening and in a flash was through and running down the trail. Stumbling, half falling, running, panting along, he followed the trail, now almost invisible in the waning light, around and down the mountain towards the plateau where the camp lay twinkling with electricity. Fatty’s heart and soul reached forward wildly toward those lights as he raced forward. Behind him he imagined soft padding footsteps and the light, slinking forms of great, gaunt cats stalking him. He had heard that the mountains were full of wildcats. Fatty reflected that they would be glad to dine on anything so juicy and tender as his own plump self. Fear lent him wings.
As he rounded the last curve before hitting the open road that led back to camp, he collided with two tramps coming slowly up the mountain. He bounced back with a cry, and as the ill-looking fellows started to swear, Fatty apologized, and dashed past, giving the strangers a wide berth. Fatty wondered if they were moonshiners. He had heard of them, and each man was heavily loaded with a pack that covered his back. What Fatty could see of their faces in the gathering gloom did not tend to make him want to stop and converse. He fled toward camp. Once he nearly went headlong, but saved himself, and feeling of his pocket to see if he had lost the queer cylinder he hurried toward his goal.
Outside the Adjutant’s office, Fatty recognized the well-known lines of Frank’s little flivver, and around it a dejected group that split up as he approached and greeted him with a volley of questions and reproaches.
Fatty, absent and possibly hurt, had taken on the aspect of a dear departed. Fatty, turning up perfectly hale and hearty, was an object of scorn and reproaches.
Ernest and Frank and Eddie and Dee, ably assisted by Bill and Skinny, demanded to know what he meant by it, where he had been, why had he gone away, and what ailed him anyway.
When the hubbub subsided a little and they were on their way, it transpired that the whole party had gone all the way back along the trail to see if they could see anything of the lost one. They had found no trace of him, and there had been no answer to their shouts.
Fatty thought guiltily that he must have been asleep. The more they talked, giving him no chance to explain, the more Fatty felt that he would not tell anything about his experience. So when at length Frank quelled the uproar by saying, “Let’s let Fatty tell us what he has been doing,” Fatty serenely told them that he had gone off in the woods, had fallen asleep, and that was all there was of it. No adventure, no excitement, nothing. Just that.
“Well, I am sorry for you!” said Eddie with scorn. “You can’t tell me! I know why you went, and that’s what you get for going off and hogging all that lunch. Just went to sleep all afternoon. Serves you right! We had a peach of a feed. Frank bought some dandy eats, and pop, and ginger ale, and say! we went up in Ernest’s plane and ran across an eagle. Say, his wings were twenty or thirty feet across, and we had a fight with him!”
“Now I know you are lying,” said Fatty glumly.