“And I guess he’ll stay here as long as he has a mind to,” observed Roy.
“Well, I guess he won’t,” retorted Arthur.
“I know what you mean,” said Roy. “You mean that the arm of the law is strong enough to snatch him out of the swamp. I don’t dispute it. The trouble is going to be to get hold of him. If he finds the low lands getting too warm for him, he will take to the mountains; and you know that there are a good many places among them where a white man has never yet set his foot.”
“He’ll come out, all the same,” answered Arthur; “but as long as he stays around, Sherwin’s Pond is no place for hunting and fishing parties, unless they bring some one with them to watch the camp while they are rambling about in the woods. We must warn the hotel people as soon as we get back to town.”
“You said there was something we could use to our advantage,” suggested Joe.
“Yes. We can see any amount of sport here this fall with the grouse. We flushed a lot of them while we were gone,” he added, turning to Tom, “but of course we didn’t shoot at them.”
“Why not?” inquired the latter.
“Why, because the close season isn’t over yet, and the birds are protected by law.”
Tom and his cousins had nothing to say, but they wondered if Arthur Hastings always obeyed the game laws when he was alone in the woods. They had not much respect for him if he did. They could not lay claim to any great skill themselves. An October grouse on the wing would have been as safe from harm a dozen yards away from the muzzles of their double-barrels, as though he had been on the other side of the globe. They always killed their game sitting; and they would shoot at a robin as soon as they would shoot at a wild turkey.
“We didn’t come down here to go home hungry,” said Joe, pointing to a bunch of squirrels that lay at the foot of the nearest tree. “We’ll have two courses to our dinner or breakfast, or whatever you call a meal eaten at this time of day, and there’s plenty of water in the spring to wash it down with.”