"Oh! my stars! but aren't you a screamer though, Andy, with all that blood smeared over your face; and Bluff, why he looks as if he'd been in a prize fight!" was the way Bobolink expressed his feelings, bending over as he laughed.
"Huh! you're not so very pretty yourself!" replied Bluff, with not the slightest sign of an impediment in his speech—evidently it had been frightened out of his system for the time being. "Anybody'd think you were a South Sea Islander on the warpath. And wouldn't they cross over to the other side of the road in a hurry if they met you! Say, if Mazie Kenwood or Laura Carson could only see you now, they'd give you the cut straight."
"Look at Jack's bump, would you?" Tom Betts exclaimed.
"Don't call attention to me any more than you can help," Jack remarked, making a wry face, as he caressed the protuberance on his forehead; "it feels as big as a walnut, let me tell you, and hurts like fun. The sooner I'm back in camp, so I can slap some witch hazel on that lump, the better it'll please me, boys."
After a little more laughing and grumbling, Paul, who had escaped without any visible hurts, though he walked a little lame, remarked:
"Well, do we start right back again, and take a look-in on those men?
Don't everybody speak at once, now!"
All the same they did, and the burden of the united protest was that circumstances alter cases; that they had arrived at the conclusion that what those men were doing on the island could be no affair of honest, law-abiding scouts; and that as for them, the camp in the sink offered more attractions at that particular moment than anything else they could think of.
Of course that settled it. The scouting was over for that occasion. They had done themselves credit, as far as it went; but then, who would ever dream that they would come within an ace of being blown sky-high with the whole upper end of the island?
As if by common consent, they started to move forward again, and every fellow seemed to know, as if by instinct, which was south, and whereabouts the camp was, for they needed no pilot now.
And as they journeyed they talked it all over. Every boy seemed to have an opinion of his own with regard to what had happened, and they differed radically.