“Have his parents been notified?”
“No, I’m going to town myself this evening,” said Mr. Ellsworth. “I’ll tell them. My idea is to have him remain with us.”
“And who will care for him while you are gone?”
Mr. Ellsworth laughed. “Oh, Doc will be glad to get rid of me,” said he. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”
“You bathed it with carbolic, did you?”
“No, Doc tells me carbolic is a little out of date. How about that, Doc?”
Doc assented and there was something so eloquently suggestive of efficiency about Doc that, although Mrs. Bennett sniffed audibly, she did not venture to ask what antiseptic had been used. She had supposed that antiseptics of all kinds would be quite unheard of in a camp of boys, and here out in the woods she was being told by a quiet, respectful young fellow in a khaki suit that her favorite antiseptic was “out of date.”
She received the blow with fortitude.
At a little distance from the tent several boys were engaged in the preparation of supper and the setting of the long board under the trees. Others were busy with various forms of house-keeping, or rather camp-keeping, and her domestic instinct prompted her to cast an occasional shrewd look at the systematic and apparently routine work which was going on. What she could not help noticing was the general aspect of orderliness which the camp displayed. Not a paper box nor a tin can was to be seen. She had always associated camping with a sort of rough-and-tumble life and with carelessness in everything pertaining to one’s physical welfare. Cleanliness was, to her notion, quite incompatible with life in tents and cooking out of doors.
Her casual discovery of the practice of testing the river water at stated intervals was in the nature of a knock-out blow. She felt a little bewildered as she watched the comings and goings of the troop members. She did not altogether like the realization that the water which had never been tested for her own son’s bathing was regularly tested for this “Wild West crew.”