I said, “You’re a nice one to be talking that way; you were with Harry Donnelle all the time he was up here.”
He said, “Yes, but now I have to mind the baby.”
“All right,” I told him; “what you say goes.”
From the looks of things it seemed as if none of the others had talked about it, not even Pee-wee. He’s a wise little dumb-bell, I’ll say that for him. So it was all right—for the time being.
After a little while we said good-bye to the girls and started off again on our left-handed hike. They went down to the shore with us and waited while we fixed the boat up and put another plug in the bottom. It was a wooden one. We don’t mind poverty, but rags we can’t stand—not in the flooring of boats.
Warde said, “We want to know where the lake is, inside the boat or outside. We want it to be one place or the other.”
Stella Wingate said, “If you were sea scouts you’d know that some kind of a rag is necessary on every boat in case you want to fly a signal of distress.”
“Sure,” I said; “every time you wave your signal the boat sinks. You might as well take the rag without the boat when you’re sailing; that’s logic.” Brent said, “That’s a very good suggestion.” The girls said they were sorry to see us go. I told them to look the other way, and they wouldn’t see it. They said we seemed to have a lot of fun. Brent was awful funny. He shook hands with them very sober like and he said, “There was a sameness in our lives till we met you. Life was just one thing over and over again.”
“And under,” I said. “Don’t forget our young hero.”
“You girls changed the whole course of our lives,” Warde said. “You have helped us to get somewhere in life. But we don’t know where.”