I said, “What are you going to do, Herve? Suppose it’s him, what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to make him admit what he did, I’m going to make him admit it to Arnoldson,” Hervey said. “That’s all I care about.”
“And then you’ll stay—at camp?”
“What? Me?” he said. “Not so you’d notice it. I’m through with this crowd—a lot of medal chasers.”
I was rowing and he was sitting sideways up on the stern seat with his knees drawn up and his hands clasped around them. The little hat without any brim that he always wore looked funny. It always looked funny but, I don’t know, that night it looked especially funny. It was all cut full of holes. Somehow it kind of seemed to me that nobody understood him. Maybe Sandwich did. Anyway I hoped that things would work out like he thought they would.
I said, “Herve, if the fellow that answered you lisped, why didn’t you say so right then? Didn’t it make you suspicious?”
He said, “I never thought about it till we got back, and I saw how things looked in the office—and Arnoldson called me a liar. Then I remembered. I remembered that the fellow we met lisped and that the voice over the ’phone lisped. I’ll nail him all right,” he said. “You leave it to me. He’s got more resourcefulness, or whatever you call it, than most of you chaps have, I’ll say that much for him.”
“Thanks for the compliment,” I said. It seemed funny to me that he wasn’t mad at the fellow for what he did, only at Mr. Arnoldson. He seemed to think the fellow had done a pretty good stunt. If anybody can understand Hervey—g-o-o-d night!
He just sat there, perched up on the stern seat, very calm and quiet. I couldn’t make out if he really wanted to square himself or just have an adventure. I rowed around past the outlet and then he beckoned for me to stop. I rested on my oars, and we both listened. It was very still. Once a fish jumped, and that startled me. I could hear an owl way far off.
We drifted out from shore a little till we couldn’t see the shore at all. It seemed as if we were in the middle of the ocean; we couldn’t see anything only just a little water around us. It was so strange it had me nervous. There wasn’t any light anywhere that we could see.