“No, the mane skunk probably dumped the whole of it in and took the bottle away wid him,” Tom agreed.
“Did Father say when he would be up?” Jack asked.
“Not fer sartin sure, but as soon as he could git away, in a day or two he said,” Tom replied.
“Well, don’t you think it would be a good plan to wait till he comes and see what he thinks about it?”
“I think you’re right. A day or two probably won’t make much difference one way or the other, and if we do the wrong thing we might make a bad matter worse,” Bob replied, and Tom nodded his head in agreement.
CHAPTER XI.
BIG BEN FALLS DOWN AGAIN.
It was pitch dark in the bunk house when Bob awoke. Unless disturbed it was an unusual thing for him to wake up before time to get up, so, expecting every minute to hear the rising horn, he lay for a few minutes in a half doze. Finally, as the call did not come, he glanced at his wrist watch, and with a start of surprise saw that it was only two o’clock. With a sigh of relief, for he was still sleepy, he turned over and closed his eyes, expecting to be asleep in another minute. But to his surprise, he continued to keep awake. He wondered how the sick horses were and if his father would be able to find others to take their places until they were able to work again. Then he fell to wondering what Big Ben would try next in his efforts to delay their work.
A half hour passed and still he could not sleep. Finally, when the luminous dial told him that he had been awake a full hour, he resolved to get up and join Sam in the horse shed.
“There’s no use lying here awake,” he thought, as he slid from his bunk to the floor, and very quietly, so as not to disturb anyone, began pulling on his clothes. This done, he groped his way to the door, and opening it carefully stepped out into the night. It was very cold, “thirty below at least,” he thought, as he pulled the door shut. The night was clear, and stars, which thickly studded the heavens, gave a faint cold light which enabled him to see dimly for some distance. For a moment he stood drinking in the beauty of the night and filling his lungs with the spruce scented air. Then he turned toward the shed, but at that moment he happened to glance at the office. With a sudden start of amazement, he noticed that the door was part way open.
“That’s mighty strange,” he thought. “But perhaps Tom couldn’t sleep either and has gone out to see how the horses are. At any rate I’ll know in a minute.”