“Knows a lot is good,” said Brent laughing.
“I’d like to make a try for that,” Hervey said. “It would be some stunt.”
“Are we going to take the first road to the left?” Brent asked. “Or are we going to call it off and go back to camp?”
“Answered in the affirmative,” I shouted. After that nothing more was said about the accident and the tin box. I guess we all saw that Brent wanted us to drop the subject.
Hervey was busy trying to swing up into the branches of trees as we passed through the outlet, so I guess he wasn’t thinking much about that business either. It’s nice and dim in the outlet because the trees reach all the way across it and in some places you can’t even see the sky. Two or three times we had to backwater so as to take Hervey in again where he was hanging from some tree or other. Once he hung upside down by his feet. One place we saw a muskrat swimming across.
Now when you row through the outlet after a while you come to a road that branches away from the outlet to the left. That goes through Brookside. So we drew the boat up there (that’s where the girls told us to leave it) and started following that road. If it hadn’t been for our trying to have some fun with Pee-wee when we got to Brookside, I guess maybe this story would be nothing but nonsense from beginning to end. But it turned out to be something else beside nonsense—you’ll see.
In Brookside Warde said, “We’ll ’phone to camp here and get it off our minds.”
I said, “Sure, tell them not to expect us till they see us; maybe not even then.”
“And I’ll get a soda at the same time,” Pee-wee said. “I’ll treat one fellow to soda because I’ve only got a quarter and a nickel and four pennies.”
I said, “After paying for two sodas you’ll look like a sharpy.”