"Why, for camping, I suppose," confessed Greg.
"You wouldn't live in a tent, at this time of the year, would you?"
"If we had to," assented young Holmes. "What we were talking about was building some kind of a shack in the woods somewhere."
"Rather a bad time of the year for building operations," smiled Lawyer Ripley dryly.
"But this wouldn't be so very much of an operation, sir," urged Greg. "Now that we've sixty dollars between us, we ought to be able to buy enough lumber to put up quite a shanty."
"Yes; and probably have enough money left to pay for the teaming of the lumber a few miles," agreed the man of law. "But there wouldn't be enough to pay the carpenters."
"We might be able to build a small shack ourselves," proposed Tom Reade.
"Why, so you might," admitted the lawyer, half smiling. "However, any task that is worth doing is much better done by one used to that kind of work. When do you want to go camping?"
"Why, right after to-morrow, Christmas," replied Dick. "We could stay in the woods, if our parents let us go, until about the end of the present vacation."
"It would take you at least that length of time to build the shack, I should think," suggested the lawyer. "Until you had it built you might have to wrap up in the snow at night for your sleep. And, then, when you had it all built, you would discover that the shack didn't belong to you, but to the owner of the land on which you built it. He could order you away from the shack if he were so disposed."