“For pity’s sake, what do you mean, Andy?” cried poor bewildered Tubby. “Please be good and explain it all in a jiffy. I’ll certainly burst if you don’t, I’m that keyed up now.”
“I believe you will, sure enough, for I can hear the hoops of the tub creaking under the strain right now,” chuckled the other; and then making a fresh start, he went on to say: “This is our jolly chum, Tubby Hopkins, Donald. We call him our Friar Tuck when we play at Robin Hood of the Greenwood Forest, you know. It is his uncle who has been hunting here and making his headquarters in this old logging camp, though just now he’s up at the Tucker Pond trying for the big bull moose. Donald McGuffey, Tubby, a Canadian boy who belongs to the scouts in his town across the line and who’s been visiting a cousin on our side.”
Rob came hurrying up bearing a small zinc box such as salve is often kept in. He was down on his knees without asking questions and assisting the injured lad to roll up his trousers leg to the knee. It seemed that Donald had a wise and careful mother, for he was wearing, in addition to the corduroy trousers, a pair of extra thick drawers.
“You’re lucky, Donald,” Rob told the other, “for these corduroys would serve as a mighty good buffer; and, besides, you’ve had a pad in the other garment. Bad as your leg may be bruised, it would have been a whole lot worse only for these shields.”
By this time he had bared the lower part of Donald’s limb. The boy had his teeth clenched tightly together, as though necessarily there was more or less acute pain connected with this business; but it could not make him even wince, such was his astonishing grit. Andy surveyed him with renewed admiration, for if there was one thing that he liked to see it was this quality in a fellow. Andy himself was in the habit of also setting his teeth grimly when in pain and suppressing all groans.
As for Tubby, he stared as though he half believed he might be asleep and dreaming all this. He saw a dark black-and-blue bruise on the white skin of the boy’s leg, halfway up to the knee. Doubtless there was another just like it on the opposite side. Tubby knew it must hurt like anything. He also wondered greatly what could have given such strange bruises. Then Rob, speaking, excited his curiosity still further.
“You see,” said the scout master, as he started to gently rub some of the soothing salve on the leg of the Canadian boy, “if the springs of that trap had been new and vigorous instead of rusted out and weak, they might have broken the bone here. As it was, they just gripped you and held tight enough to keep you from breaking away, seeing that you couldn’t possibly manage to get around so as to press down one of the springs.”
“Trap!” ejaculated Tubby. “Oh, why don’t you hurry up and explain it all to me, Andy Bowles? Rob, you tell me, won’t you? What sort of a trap was this poor fellow caught in?”
“It was an old bear trap, you see, that his own cousin had set a while ago, thinking to make use of it, as he had seen the tracks of a big black bear over this way,” Andy hastened to say. “Donald was hurrying along through the woods, never thinking about anything of this kind, when all at once he found himself caught. He’s been held fast there for more than an hour, calling out for help as loudly as he could. He was in a desperate hurry to get across the line, because by accident he overheard some rascals scheming to blow up the railway bridge this very night.”
“Great thunder!” was all Tubby could gasp, but the look on his face spoke volumes.