“Yes, I am,” I said, “they just did it on account of me.”
“That’s because all the fellows like you,” he said, “and they like to do anything for you.”
Anyway, it wasn’t so necessary, I see that now, and it’s just the same as if I killed him. Gee, I wish it was I that got killed, I know that. Cracky, I deserved to after being such a fool.
After that, nobody spoke for a long time, then Hunt Ward, who’s in the Elk Patrol, said, “It’s the first fellow in our troop that died. I guess we won’t go up to camp now.”
“Not in this boat, anyway,” I said.
Then after a while I said, “We’ll send his name in and they’ll print it in Boys Life.”
“I know,” Hunt said, “with a black line around it.”
Yet we kind of kept hoping all the time, even though we knew there wasn’t any sense in it.
“You thought you were a goner,” Hunt said, “and you came back all right.”
Now I was a big fool that it didn’t put a certain idea in my head when he said that, but I only said, “Yes, but that was different.”