Until yesterday all had gone well. After work, with Philip reading the copy, Joe had finished the typesetting, and then, triumphantly, they had pulled a smudgy proof and viewed it with pride and elation. Just why at such a joyous moment the subject of painting the camp should have crept into the conversation is beyond knowledge, but it did, and half an hour later the two friends had parted in enmity, Philip flinging back as he clanged the front gate behind him: “Then I guess there won’t be any housewarming!” and Joe replying haughtily: “Suits me all right!”
They had started the camp in April during Joe’s week of vacation, dragging the timbers and boards from Loomis’s mill behind Mr. Levering’s Ford. By the end of the week it was complete even to the two windows, and they had stood off and viewed their work with pleasurable emotion. Everything about it was delectable: the tar-papered roof that smelled so gloriously in the spring sunshine, the little four-foot, uncovered porch that ran the ten-foot length of the front, the door that wouldn’t quite close unless you put your full weight against it, the little square windows—everything!
“Gee,” Philip had exclaimed, “it will look perfectly corking when we get it painted!”
And Joe had agreed heartily. What color it was to be painted hadn’t been discussed then. The painting of it was to await Joe’s home coming in June. It nearly broke their hearts that they couldn’t enjoy their handiwork, but Joe was returning to school the next day, and so they finally clicked the padlock on the door and, not without many backward looks, left the cabin behind.
Philip had guarded it as well as he could during the ensuing two months, but Joe had received one heartbroken letter from him in May in which he told of going out to Squirrel Lake and finding the cabin broken into and both window panes smashed.
“It was ‘Bull’ Jones and Harper Merrill and that crowd that did it,” Philip had stated, “but you can’t prove anything on them.”
Philip had repaired damages and when Joe got back the last of June the cabin had not been again molested.
Since then the two boys had found time to furnish the camp. They had put in an old stove from the Kenton attic, a table and two chairs and a camp cot—some day they meant to have another cot—and cooking things and tin plates and so on until the furnishings threatened to exclude the occupants. The housewarming idea had been Joe’s. It would, he explained, be dandy to issue invitations and have, say, about ten of the fellows out there for supper. They could go out in the Fullerton bus and walk back by moonlight. Joe wasn’t certain about the moonlight, but he hoped for the best. Philip accepted the idea with enthusiasm, making but one reservation: none of Bull Jones’s crowd should be asked! To this Joe agreed unhesitatingly, even passionately, and that evening they had arranged a menu for the supper, counted their cash on hand and composed the invitations. The next day Joe had brushed the dust from the printing press in the stable loft and, with Philip aiding, set type, worked the lever of the neglected press and pulled a proof.
Joe laid the invitations back now with a frown. He wondered why he had gone to the trouble of printing them, since they would never be used. Even if he and Philip made up again later, those cards wouldn’t be any good, for there was the date set forth plainly: “Thursday, July 6.” And that was only a week from to-day, and Joe was very, very sure that he couldn’t be persuaded to forgive Philip in any such brief space of time as a week!
He turned moodily away and looked out of the window. On the Merrill’s back porch Harper and Pete Brooks were doing something with a board and some wire. Harper kept rabbits and perhaps the contrivance had something to do with them. Joe wasn’t interested, anyway. If he had been he could easily have gained enlightenment for the porch was only fifty feet away and the back of the house acted like a sounding board and threw the voices of the two boys right in at the window. But Joe was busy with his thoughts.