“Here, we’ll help you untie the knots in your clothing,” offered Teddy. “And maybe we can find your shoes, if we look a little more.”
“I surely hope we can,” spoke Tommy, who had managed to get his shirt on. “I don’t see who could have done this.”
“Oh, someone sneaked up when we weren’t looking,” was the opinion of Herbert Kress.
“Yes, and I believe I know who it was!” suddenly exclaimed Billie Ruggler. “It was that Jakie Norton. He did it to get even with Tommy for taking the bat away from him that time.”
“I believe you’re right,” agreed Teddy. “If we had Jakie here now, there’s enough of us to duck him! How about it?”
“Sure we would!” came in a chorus from the other lads. They had succeeded by this time in getting most of the knots out of Tommy’s clothes, and now, as the boys were nearly all dressed, they began a more careful search for the missing shoes.
“Here they are!” suddenly called Mortimer Manchester, who had gone some distance back from the brook. “They’re in this old stump, and they’re filled with sand and gravel. That was a mean trick, all right!”
“It sure was!” agreed the other boys, while Tommy hurried over to claim his footwear. The shoes were filled to the top with the wet material from the banks of the stream, and even when they were emptied they were damp and hard to put on.
“But it’s better than not finding them at all,” observed Tommy. “I can manage to squeeze my feet into ’em,” which he did.
“I don’t see how Jakie Norton—if it was him that did it—could sneak up and we not see him,” observed Joie Grubb.