Jerry presently threw up his hands, and as the other continued to tantalize him by keeping up a running fire of breakfast hints, he even went so far as to thrust his fingertips in his ears.
“That’s adding insult to injury, Bluff,” he told his chum, when he found a chance to speak. “Because I don’t believe we could scare up a scrap of grub this morning, no matter how hard we searched our pockets. We cleaned it all out at suppertime, you remember.”
“Well, there’s one last resort, if we have to come to it!” remarked Bluff, with an assumed dejected air, as he rubbed his chin between his thumb and forefinger.
Something about his manner caused Jerry to look at him in horror.
“Now, I can guess what you’re hinting at, and I tell you right straight from the shoulder I never could be hired to eat wolf, not if I was actually starving.”
“Oh, well, I can’t say I’m really hankering after the dish myself,” Bluff admitted; “but you never can tell what you may have to come to. Some people don’t like to eat crow, but it’s been found they’re not so very bad, after all. It might turn out the same way with wolf.”
“Are you going to help me get that jacket off the rascal?” demanded Jerry.
“Sure I will!” he was told. “You’d make a sorry mess of the job, I reckon; and if the thing’s worth saving at all it ought to be taken the right way. I don’t say I could do it as well as Frank, who’s had a heap more experience; but you’ll get the pelt, Jerry, never fear.”
“Then the sooner we finish the job the better,” said the other boy; “because it strikes me we had better be leaving here and heading for home as soon as we can make it. I only hope we don’t get lost, and that we strike camp in time for the middle-of-the-day feed.”
Both were speedily engaged in the task of taking off the skin of the slain wolf. Bluff did the main part of the work, but the other was handy at times in various ways.