“Don’t worry,” returned her brother, laughing. 79 “I’ve taken the trigger screw out of Purt’s gun and he couldn’t shoot it if he had forty cartridges in it. But I haven’t told Purt, for the dear boy seems to place implicit confidence in the old gat as a defense against anything on two or four legs in the Big Woods.”
CHAPTER IX
THE CAMP ON ACORN ISLAND
Although it was high noon when they were at Lumberport the Girls of Central High and their boy friends had not lunched there. Indeed, they waited to reach a certain pleasant grove which some of them knew about, on the south shore of the river, and several miles above the spot where Purt Sweet had taken his involuntary ducking.
As the motorboats put ashore and the boys tied them to stubs in the high bank, they all began joking Purt about his plunge into the river. The dude had been obliged to exchange his natty outing suit of Lincoln green for a suit of oil-stained overalls that he found in the cabin of the Duchess. He could not find his own baggage, as the boys with him had hidden it.
As for the tam-o’-shanter, it had fallen off and floated down the stream. Purt would never see that remarkable headgear again.
“But that isn’t what the boy is worrying 81 about,” chuckled Lancelot Darby, as the party came ashore with the luncheon hampers. “It’s the fate of the Barnacle that is corroding Purt’s sensitive soul!”
“How do you make that out?” demanded Reddy Butts, broadly grinning.