Anyway, the day passed soon enough, even if we didn’t have much to do, and after supper, Harry said very innocent sort of, “Roy, suppose you and Dorry hike into Kingston with me and carry home some stuff. The rest of you start a fire.”
Little Willie Wide-awake piped up, “I’ll go with you.” But Harry just ruffled up his hair, the same as he was always doing with me and said, “You just sit here and watch the fire. See what you can find in the fire. The other night we were seeing all sorts of things in the fire—pictures and things. You can find all kinds of pictures in fires, can’t you, Brent?”
Brent Gaylong said, “That’s the idea.”
So then Harry gave the little fellow a kind of a push so he went sprawling right down all over the other fellows. Gee, I bet those kids liked him. I don’t know, but he had a way about him that everybody liked. After we started I told him he ought to be a scoutmaster, and he said he would only he had a date in Labrador. He said he had a date to go hunting seals. Another time he told us he had a date to kill a man in Australia. He had a lot of dates.
On the way to Kingston he said to us, “Did you give that newspaper article back to Gaylong?” And I told him, “Yes.”
“All right,” he said; “we don’t want that in our possession. We have nothing to do with this business; see?”
Dorry said, “Sure, we understand.”
Then Harry said, “Now I don’t want you kids to be disappointed if this wild man of Borneo turns out not to be wandering Horace at all; see?”
“I can’t be mistaken,” I told him.
He said, “Well, Columbus was mistaken when he thought he’d reached India, and he was smarter than you.”