“There I was, had been waiting about half an’ hour, when the baboons arrived. They began digging in the sand like regular ditch diggers. How they did make the dirt fly. There were baboons everywhere, scores of them. The whole tribe must have eaten pretzels and then hustled off to this spot in the river with a whale of a thirst to be squenched.
“I was fooling around, trying to get a good focus, for the light was tricky. And at last I had just what I wanted, and set my hand to the crank, all ready to begin grinding.
“At that moment, something lighted on my head with such force that I fell clean out of my perch. But fortunately the ground wasn’t far away, a matter of three or four feet.
“I didn’t know what had struck me. But when I got to my feet and looked around, there sat a baboon in my old perch. And he was cranking away, just grinding for dear life, and chattering with delight.
“The beggar had jumped on my head, and then had taken my job away from me.”
The boys roared.
“What did you do?” asked Frank.
“Do? I bows to him and says, ‘Please, Mr. Baboon, won’t you go away?’ And after giving me a line of baboon talk that I couldn’t understand because I didn’t have my dictionary with me, he swung away to join his friends.”
“But the camera?” asked Jack. “Had the baboon damaged it?”
“Not a bit of it,” averred Niellsen. “I found the focus still good, and continued to grind out some more film. And I believe the beggar took some good stuff while he was at the crank. If it comes out all right in developing, I’m going to have stuff worth a fortune. ‘Baboons photographed by one of their number.’ Can’t you just see that caption on the screen?”