For reclining upon a rough bunk, with knees drawn up, was Archibald Archer, busily engaged in whittling a stick, his freckled nose wrinkling up in a kind of grotesque accompaniment to each movement of his hand against the hard wood.
"I—I thought——" Tom began.
"Well,—I'll—be——" countered Archer.
For a moment they stared at each other in blank amaze. Then a smile crept over Tom's face, a smile quite as unusual with him as his sudden spirit of surrender had been; a smile of childish happiness. He almost broke out laughing from the reaction.
"Are you carvin' a souvenir?" he said foolishly.
"No, I ain't carrvin' no souveneerr," Archer answered. "Therre's fish among those rocks and I'm goin' to spearr 'em."
"You ain't carvin' a what!" said Tom.
"I ain't carrvin' a souveneerr," Archer said with the familiar Catskill Mountain roll to his R's.
"I just wanted to hear you say it," said Tom, limping over to him and for the first time in his life yielding to the weakness of showing sentiment.
"All night long," he said, sitting down on the edge of the bunk, "I was thinkin' how you said it—and it sounds kind of good——"