“What does it mean? Tell us!”
“Not here in the downpour. We’ll go to camp first and get under the shelter and put on some dry clothes. My teeth are chattering and I don’t care to imitate them. Come on!”
XII
TOM’S DARING VENTURE
Tom’s teeth were indeed chattering when the company reached their camp. He was chilled “clear through,” he said, and his companions were very uneasy. They feared, and not without reason, that he had contracted a swamp fever, which always begins with a chill. To avoid that, the Rutledge boys, who knew the coast and its dangers, had carefully kept on or very near the salt water, and had chosen for their camp a spot where there were no live oaks, no gray moss and no black sand. Still Tom might have caught a fever.
Cal piled wood on the fire with a lavish hand, so that an abundance of heat might be reflected into their dry bush shelter, the open side of which faced the fire, and Dick busied himself searching out dry clothes from the lockers, while Larry helped Tom to strip himself as speedily as possible.
“Now run and jump into the creek,” he directed, as soon as the last of Tom’s clothes were off. “The salt water is luke-warm or even warmer than that. I’ll wring out your clothes while your bath is warming you, and when you come out we’ll give you a rub down that would stimulate circulation in a bronze statue. Hurry into the water, and don’t hurry out too soon.”
By the time Tom had been rubbed down and had got into dry clothes, he declared himself to be “as warm as a toast, as hungry as a schoolgirl, and ready to stand a rigid examination as to the character and purposes of our scoundrel friends down there.”