But to Westy’s dismay, the estimable Mr. Martin took up the conversation at the dinner table, where he had left off.
“As I was going to say before dinner,” he began, “I think it would be a very wise plan for Westy to make the most of his next summer’s vacation.”
“How?” Westy hopefully asked.
“By getting something to do like most energetic boys would do, instead of running around wild the whole summer with some unknown Wild Westerner.”
“But, Father,” Westy, crestfallen, despairingly pleaded, “I was speaking to Art to-day and it seems that he was planning on me asking him to go. His mother and father had already given their consent.”
“Really, my boy, that was quite a presumptuous thing for him to do considering that he had not yet been asked. Perhaps though, you had given him encouragement!”
“No, that’s just it. I knew I wouldn’t be able to go and that’s why I didn’t ask him.”
“Then he was presuming,” his father said. “Talking about the Rocky Mountains it reminds me that I was talking with Archie on my way home on the train and I was telling him about this idiotic thing that Mr. Temple had planned for you and this Rushmore man, and he thought, as I do, that it’s a perfectly ridiculous idea for two such young boys as you and Artie Van Arlen to go in that wild country, accompanied only by this perfect stranger whom even Mr. Temple knows little about. Archie remarked that he thought perhaps he might take a longer vacation next summer and visit the Rockies himself. A nice, steady young man like that is well deserving of some recreation when he works as faithfully as he does the year round.
“Now,” Mr. Martin continued, “if a sensible person like Captroop was to accompany you, why I might make allowances!”
“That would be better than missing it altogether, Wes,” his sister Doris remarked.