“What’s his name—Claptrap?” said Westy.
“You haven’t asked about your friend, Artie Van Arlen,” said Mr. Martin. “He had a very narrow escape from death up at Temple Camp. And so did you, from all I hear. You didn’t write us a great deal about that, Wes.”
“I didn’t want you to worry,” said Westy, a trifle embarrassed.
The fact was that Westy had not in his letters depicted the affair of the rock in all its seriousness. Every opportunity for adventure that he had ever had had been wrenched from his father after a struggle in which Doris had boldly championed her brother and poor Mrs. Martin had been his gentler ally.
Mr. Martin believed in people, even young people, being “steady and sane” and he seemed forever haunted by the thought that scouting was something in which boys broke their necks and that camps were places where they contracted typhoid fever. You could not pry those ideas out of Mr. Martin’s head with a crowbar. It was for this reason that poor Westy always skimmed lightly over his adventures and related the doings at Temple Camp with cautious reticence. But he might have known that the news of Artie’s mishap would reach Bridgeboro before him.
“Well, my boy,” said Mr. Martin, sensing the cause of his son’s reticence and speaking mildly in consideration of the boy’s homecoming, “I think you should have told us the whole story.”
“I don’t see what Artie’s accident has to do with Wes’s going out to Montana,” said Doris. “It wasn’t a case of telling the whole story at all; they are two different stories.”
“Well, then, I don’t see why he didn’t tell both of them,” said Mr. Martin. “The Van Arlen boy had a close call from death while in company of this old man. From all I can gather Wes had a pretty narrow escape too—helping this old man. And this is the very same old man that Mr. Temple wants Wes to go off to the four corners of the earth with and risk his neck. It’s very easy for Mr. John Temple to arrange for other people’s sons’ fighting Indians and all such nonsense and breaking their necks into the bargain. Mr. John Temple has no son of his own. Why, I thought all this dime novel hocus-pocus was put on the shelf long ago. Now here is Mr. John Temple filling boys’ minds with all such nonsense and sending them off with some old fire-eater to the frontier of nowhere. The man’s philanthropy has gone to his head. Here you are all home again, not three hours in the house, and Wes talking about going to some cabin or other out West next summer when he ought to be thinking about school to-morrow morning. What boy is he going to take with him, I’d like to know?”
“I made up my mind. It’s Artie,” said Westy timidly.
“Oh, I’m so glad,” said Doris; “he deserves it, for his heroism.”