“He’s going to sit out the next dance,” Hervey said.
“What happened?” I asked him.
Then he told me just how it was. The fellow was dragging the lake with a seine. He had fastened one end of it on shore and was rowing with the other end. When Hervey lifted the seine and grabbed it the fellow happened to be standing in his boat and it pulled him over into the water. He grabbed the boat along the side and, of course, that swamped it.
I’ll say one thing, if the old tin box is ever found that will be the way to find it—dragging with a seine. And that cake-eater would have stood a pretty good chance of finding it too if he had been free to work in the daytime. But he was trying to do it all alone in the night, that was the trouble. Anyway it gave him a good scare and took all the nerve out of him.
Hervey said to him, “Well, you had a wild night. If you had only told me what you were going to do when we were talking over the ’phone I’d have joined in with you. And we’d have found it. It serves you right for staying away from dances. You have to come back with us to tell one of the keepers that I’m not a liar and then I’ll hike as far as Catskill with you if you’re going that way.”
“I’m staying at Brookside,” the sharpy said.
“Well, come over to Temple Camp anyway and see the fun,” Hervey said. “It’ll do you good.”
I saw that Hervey was just in one of those happy-go-lucky, reckless moods, and that now after all he didn’t care so much about anything—unless there was an adventure in it.
So I said, “Mr. Wilkins, or whatever your name is, only I guess that isn’t your name, when you had your first scare to-night, that was when you heard the ’phone ring over at camp, you got this fellow in Dutch. You got him called a liar because he said he ’phoned to camp and they never heard of any message. We know all about what you did to-night and nobody’s going to make any trouble for you, because anyway, one thing, you’ve had trouble enough. There’s a man, he’s trustee——”
“All you have to do is tell him he’s a liar,” Hervey said. “Then I’ll hike as far as Brookside with you.”