“My, and they had just joined the League,” wailed Jack. “I suppose we will all have to put up for the reinforcements.”
“We are not an insurance company,” Ed objected. “Why should we make good for a storm?”
“Because we have a calamity clause. You had better look up your rules and regulations, young man. The last time I saw them they were pasted with a daub of good family flour on our back door.”
“Thank goodness the rain will have suspended our constitution,” Ed replied. “That back door never could have gone dry through the torrent. Don’t you remember how the small showers doused it?”
“We do,” Walter answered, “and as we have the only written rules, that same fact of the back door may stand us in well.”
“Pikers!” Jack called them with a laugh. “But will you observe the Hys! They are going to rebuild!”
A hyphenated name seemed the worst of luck for this camp, for there was no strong pole or cast iron bar to hold the two tents together, and the “hy” was merely a strip of ground that gave extra play to the wind. The smaller tent was now being dragged from the bed of wet sand into which it had partly buried itself, and the campers were struggling heroically to get it back to its pegs.
“Too bad!” called Walter, sympathetically.
“Worse than that,” replied one fellow, who looked as if he might have been shipwrecked.
“But we are insured—in the league, you know,” shouted another member of the demolished camp. “We are coming up for supper.”