Once outside, he wasted no time but struck off at once cross-lots to rout out Dave Thomas and Frank Ellery. Fortunately Frank came first, otherwise Jerry might not have been equal to the task of waking up Dave. They tried everything they had ever heard of. They tickled his feet; they set off a brass-lunged alarm clock under his very nose; they dumped him roughly out of his bed, but even on the bare floor he slumbered peacefully on. Cold water brought only temporary success. They were in despair.
It was Frank who finally solved the problem. Seating himself on the foot of the bed, he raised his head much in the fashion of a hound baying at the moon—the sound that issued from his throat would put to shame the most ambitious hound that ever howled. Jerry caught up a pillow and would have shied it at the head of the offender, but the perfectly serious look on Frank's face withheld his arm. Gradually it dawned on him that the boy was trying to sing—and, more than that, it was one of Dave's favorite songs he was murdering.
Then it was that Jerry understood Frank's strategy. The bed-clothes began to heave; they had piled them all atop Dave as he lay on the floor. Frank began on the chorus. A wriggling leg emerged from beneath the comforts. Jerry joined in, his voice a villainous imitation of Frank's discords. Another leg came to view.
They began to repeat the chorus, further off key than before. One line was all they were suffered to torture. A catapult of boy, bedclothes and pillows bounded from the floor and sent Frank spinning into the bed, while Jerry barely saved himself from a spill on the floor.
"You will yowl like a lot of bob-tailed tomcats, will yuh!" yelled Dave, dancing up and down on one foot—he had stubbed his toe against one of his shoes in his charge across the room.
"You will snore away like six buzz-saws on circus day, huh?" snorted Frank, neatly catching Dave in the pit of the stomach with a pillow caught up from the floor.
For a second it looked like a free-for-all, but Jerry had no time to waste.
"Get your clothes on—hustle. We're going back to Lost Island."
"Suppose my mother won't let me?"
"Suppose you tell her we've got to go and get our boat? She'll let you go all right. You just want to get back to bed, that's all that's worrying you. Hustle, Dave. We can't lose a minute."