"I don't believe our beloved Horace, or any of his bunch, would have strolled out in such a rain," Red went on carelessly.
"Hush!" chided Kingdon. "Evil to him who evil thinks."
"It's knocked all the think out of me," said Cloudman, grinning in a sickly way.
All five felt a seriousness that they feared to display. Boys are prone to consider any show of deeper feeling unmanly.
They started to dress, and found that the most of their garments were more or less wet. As for putting on shoes and socks, that was foolish. The driest place they could find was the cabin of the catboat, and as it was almost high water they easily got aboard. When the oilstove was lighted, Cloudman started to fry soft clams and bacon for breakfast.
"Talk about paradise!" sighed Red, stretching and crowding Peewee into a space about as wide as a knife-edge. "This is it."
"It distinctly is not it," denied Hicks. "A sardine in a can feels lonesome, 'side of me. Move over, and let a fellow breathe."
Kingdon had not come aboard to stop. Getting into his oilskins, he climbed the hill above the camp alone. He was in a pretty serious mood. The bowlder had sheared the sod off the hillside for its entire course. The water was running in a brown flood down the path of the avalanche.
Where the bowlder had been set was a hole all of two feet deep, and full of water. The drainage from above, pouring down the hill, seemed to have excavated the earth from all around the station of the bowlder. It might be that the huge rock was merely washed out of its bed by the rain and started in its plunge down the hill.
Kingdon looked farther up the hill. Through the still falling drizzle he mounted the slope a few yards and found the sapling that he had before noted. It had been brought out of the woods and apparently had been put to criminal use. The smaller stone, still in position as a fulcrum, pointed to one answer to the problem. The leverage of that green stick might easily have started the bowlder to rolling. The rain had merely helped cover the fact.