“You don’t suppose they’re ‘gougers,’ do you?” snickered Springer.
“Oh, laugh—confound you, laugh!” snarled Sleuth furiously. “You think it’s a joke, don’t you?”
“Sort of sus-seems that way to me,” admitted Phil.
“Oh, say!” wailed the miserable fellow in the sleeping bag. “If I don’t get out of this thing I’ll go crazy. I tell you I’m being eaten up alive by something.”
“Did you ever read a certain essay on the ‘Power of Imagination,’ Piper?” asked Stone. “If you ever have, you should realize that a person may make himself very miserable by conceiving all sorts of foolish things.”
“No, I’ve never read your old essay,” howled Sleuth, thrashing around in the bag. “But I tell you this is no imagination; this is the real thing. Light the lantern, somebody, for the love of Mike! I’m burning up. I’m all afire.”
“But there ain’t no fire in the bag—there can’t be,” asserted Crane relentlessly. “Just the same, somebody ought to git a bucket of water and souse him. P’r’aps that would keep him still.”
Springer could hold himself in check no longer, and he burst into shrieks of laughter, during which Piper, kicking and floundering, rolled over and over until he was outside the tent.
At this point Stone sprang up and hastened out to bend over the writhing victim, and the others, eager to see all there was to be seen, also rose and peered forth.
It was with no small difficulty that Ben prevailed on Sleuth to keep quiet long enough for the mouth of the bag to be unfastened. When this was done, the boy inside scrambled forth, fiercely kicking the thing from him, and by the light of the fire he discovered a number of black ants running wildly about upon his person.