“Well! you two would be a good pair to send after trouble,” he remarked caustically, “you take so long in getting back. I was just starting off on a cruise to look for you.”
“Hullo, Capt’n Andy!” boomed Kenjo, intercepting a reply by his joyous greeting to an old friend: “Yes”—reproachfully—“you’re all taken up with the Camp Fire Girls now—Scouts don’t get a look-in!”
“Petticoats first—bloomers, rather!” chuckled the jolly mariner. “Skirts go ahead—meaning skirts have the preference, especially when they’re new-fangled skirts like these!” pointing to the khaki ceremonial dresses of the two excited girls who had forgotten all about the fuel they gathered.
“Hey! what’s the matter with this Scout? He don’t look very chipper.”
The captain laid a hand on Tommy’s shoulder.
“He’s poisoned—poisoned dead—or thinks he is; from eating blackberries an’ arsenic an’ lead!” explained Penny with great lucidity.
In a few words Kenjo cleared up the situation.
“How long is it since he ate those blackberries?” asked Captain Andy, gravely. “An hour yet?”
“Oh, I guess it is—pretty nearly an hour, anyway.”
“Well! let me tell you that if he had got enough of that arsenate of lead into him to finish him as it did the birds an’ rabbits, he’d hear more from it by this time. You’d have horrible cramps by now an’ you’d look a heap worse than you do!” The captain gazed down reassuringly on Tenderfoot Tommy, alias “the Astronomer,” who, with fat neck thrust forward, was slanting a very anxious look up at him.