"Well, we'll see," said Dick. "Meantime, if Jack has the best name in the world, it wouldn't do him much good if it had to be carved on a tombstone before he's had a chance to use it at all, and if that fellow that carried him off from our camp ever gets another chance at him, that's what he'll be needing."
It wasn't like Dick Crawford to be alarmed by anything as a rule, and the two Scouts were mightily impressed by his solemn tone and the warning he gave, as he meant them to be. He didn't want them to go into the work of guarding Jack as if he were simply a figure in a new and fascinating game. He wanted them to take the task very seriously, and give their best efforts to it. And, after such a speech, he had no doubt that they would carry out his intentions, and that if there were any way of making Jack safe from future attacks they would find it.
Jack himself suffered no ill effects worth mentioning from his rough experience, unpleasant as it had been.
"Gee, Jack," said Pete Stubbs, when he saw his chum the morning after his rescue, "one would think, just to look at you, that you liked having a chap chloroform you and kick you around a little bit of a boat. You look great!"
"I had a good night's sleep, Pete. That's why. Look at the time—it's the middle of the afternoon, isn't it? I felt a lot more tired the day after that baseball double header than I do right now. They didn't really hurt me, you see. And that swim in the cold water was just what I needed to make me feel fine after it, too. That chased the headache the drug gave me, and set me up in fine shape."
"I tell you why, Jack. It's because you always take a lot of exercise and look after yourself all the time, that things like that don't upset you."
"Say, Pete, Tom Binns is coming around here again, later. I feel so good that I think I'd like to go and do something this afternoon. What do you say? I think it would be fine to go down to the lake and have a great old swim. Summer don't last so long that I want to miss any of the swimming while it's as good as it is now."
"I'll go you!" said Pete, never thinking that it might be just such expeditions that Dick Crawford was afraid of. "Say, wouldn't it be fine to live in a place where you can go swimming all the year round, like Florida, or California, or some place like that?"
"I don't know that it would, Pete. I think all the seasons are good, in their own time. You wouldn't like never to see the snow, or to be in a place where it never froze and made ice for skating, would you?"
"Say, Jack, I never thought of that! That's a funny thing about you. You never go off the way the rest of us do, without thinking about things. You think of all sides of anything. I wish I was like that. I wouldn't make so many fool breaks!"