Tip threw up his hat and crowed as though he might be an exultant barnyard rooster that had just whipped his worst enemy.
“Oh! what luck!” he exclaimed. “Everything seems to be coming my way. I think you Oakvale fellows must have brought it along with you. ‘It never rains but it pours,’ and I don’t care if I haven’t any umbrella either. Let’s get busy and give the judge the best camp supper he ever heard about.”
“We can do that, too, Tip,” intimated Monkey. “This fellow Billy Worth has all the French chefs beat to a frazzle when he gets to slinging the pots and pans around. You’ll think so after you get a whiff of his cooking.”
“That’s a whole lot taffy, and don’t you take any stock in it, Tip,” protested the said Billy. “Course I like to cook some, and, if I do say it myself, I know how to do a few plain things fairly decent. But we’ll all lend a hand. Here, Monkey, you start the ball rolling by peeling these potatoes, while I look after the fire aboard the boat, for everything is soaked out here.”
The owner of the launch must have delighted to take little excursions on his boat, for he had everything on board that would be needed for getting up a meal, even to a three-burner blue-flame kerosene stove that worked splendidly, Billy soon discovered.
In spite of all they had gone through, the boys entered into the duty of getting up that supper with the greatest of vim. And when later on an elderly gentleman, whom Tip introduced to them as Judge Coffin, made his appearance, he found the meal ready to be served.
He was a man whose heart had always remained fresh, and who loved boys, although his twin sons had been cruelly taken from him years before through an accident, simply because no one with them had known the first thing about reviving a person who had been in the water until he seemed to be drowned.
Judge Coffin firmly believed that had the comrades of his boys been posted as all scouts of to-day are on these important methods of resuscitation, one or both of his precious twins might have been spared to him. And that was the secret of his belief in the scout movement as a means of saving life.
There on board the launch, and while enjoying such a supper as he had not sat down to for many years, no doubt—primitive though the table and the tin dishes may have been—he listened while the scouts modestly told what a great day they had had.
And, reading between the lines, that astute lawyer could easily understand how the coming of Hugh Hardin to Lawrence just when the breaking down of the railroad embankment brought about his enforced stay there had been the main cause for all this service on the part of the local scouts.