“There they are!” he cried. “There’s what bit me! I told you something was doing it. Oh, murder! let me get out of my underclothes.”
Frantically he stripped off every rag and stood stark naked in the firelight, still brushing and slapping and scratching.
“Well, I swan to man!” said Crane, who had also come out of the tent. “If them ain’t ants, I’m a woodchuck. Haow do you s’pose they got into the bag?”
“Must have been there a long tut-time,” said Springer. “Seems to me I’ve heard that one of the troubles with sleeping bags was that they made fuf-fine nests for ants and all sorts of insects. You’ll never gug-get me to sleep in one.”
“You never will me—again,” vowed Piper. “Being eaten alive by ants is worse than being burned to the stake by redskins.”
He was savagely shaking his underclothes as he spoke, having turned the garments inside out.
Stone carried the sleeping bag some distance from the camp and flung it over the low limb of a tree, and the boys urged Piper to make sure there were no ants remaining upon his person or his underclothes before he re-entered the tent.
“There are two extra blankets,” said Grant. “You can have them, Sleuth, and make yourself comfortable as possible. We’ll light the lantern and look around to make sure there are no ants left in here.”
Apparently none had escaped from the bag, and after a time Sleuth was permitted to return and settle down with the blankets beside the bed of boughs occupied by his companions. The lantern was again extinguished, and finally, one by one, the boys dropped off to sleep, although the occasional chuckling of Springer was heard even after some of the others were breathing regularly and heavily.
Gradually Piper’s wounds ceased to smart, and, with no suspicion of the fact that he had been the victim of a rather painful joke, he sought to compose himself for slumber. Nevertheless, the experience through which he had passed made it no easy matter for him to get to sleep, and he lay there, turning now and then as the minutes slipped away into hours and the hours lengthened. At times the odor of the balsam boughs mingled with the faint smell of smoke which a fitful breath of rising wind brought into the tent from the smoldering coals of the fire. The tree-toad continued its mournful peeping, and away in the woods a bird awoke and chirped. Once something fell from a tree, making a swishing sound as it cut through the leaves and struck the ground with a soft thud.