Bluff and Jerry had not a word to say. They stood and stared at the other, astonished beyond measure. Really in all their experiences far and wide they had never met with such a self-possessed young person as this.
He picked up his bag, waved them a flippant good-bye, and then actually started to run down the slope. Bluff scratched his head and grinned, while Jerry exclaimed in disgust.
"Gee whiz! if that wasn't the queerest thing ever! You'd think he'd just stubbed his toe, and we happened along in time to help him rub the same. He sure is a cool customer, believe me, fellows!"
"Such base ingratitude I never ran across," ventured Will, indignantly. "Why, only for Frank's fetching that grape-vine along, and our pulling him up so neatly, he'd have had to let go his hold before now. And say, it was all of thirty feet down to the bottom of the hole from the rock he held on to; an ugly fall, I'd call it."
"Oh! well," observed Frank, more amused than otherwise by the singular circumstance, "when a fellow pursues any fad as he does golf he seems to chase it just as we've all done one of those jack-o'-lanterns in the marsh. When the fever is on him he can't think of anything else. That match on the links is, in his mind, the greatest event under the sun. We've all been there, boys, remember."
"But where did he come from, do you think?" asked Will.
"There's a village, I recollect, over the hills that way," Frank explained; "and it's just barely possible his folks live there. Being off the railroad, you see they have to make a little journey of some miles every time they want to go to the city. We may run on to the broken-down buggy further on."
"He's still running right along," remarked Jerry.
"And hasn't bothered to look back once," added Will, as though he could not understand why the other should so easily forget about the service they had done him.
"Well, looking back caused him his other stumble, and it's taught him a lesson, I reckon," laughed Frank, always ready to offer excuses for others' failings, but never for his own.