“Take your hand off me,” cried Gordon, turning.
“You don’t mean that, Kid.”
“It’ll be time enough to crawl,” said Gordon, “when I ask you to.”
“I don’t want to crawl, old man,—or we’ll call it crawling, if you like,—I don’t care. I just want to be friends. Come on, old Black Ranger.”
But Gordon had started down the hill, and Harry stood still, watching him.
The next was a busy day for the aero club, working on the glider. When the troop assembled under the flag at sunset—the several parties of stalkers, trackers, fishers, home from their chosen haunts—and Red Deer asked the usual question, if any had done or said a thing that he would like to undo or unsay, Harry looked wistfully, almost imploringly, toward a certain round head, with a scout hat perched upon the back of it. But the owner of the round head neither spoke nor stirred.
CHAPTER XXII
HARRY FINDS A WAY
The next day the work was at a standstill, for they had gone as far as they could without the ribs and the covering. So the aero club separated, Mac and Tom joining Nelson Pierce for a day of fishing. Most of the troop went down to the lake with Red Deer for a “soak.” Harry sat on the ground near camp all the morning, his back against a huge tree, and his knees drawn up by way of a writing desk. Here he used up page after page of a writing tablet, making a variety of diagrams, only to crunch up each leaf and stuff it into one or other of his pockets.
No one was about except Charlie Greer, cook, and Johnnie Walden, cookee, who were busy in the lean-to. When Harry finally ambled over toward them, he was stiff from his long sitting. Out of the fifty or so sheets of paper he had used, there were only six that he saw fit to save. The rest he pulled out from his various pockets.
“I’m a human waste basket, Charlie,” said he. “Here, burn these up, will you?”