"Put them on," he said. "Maybe it'll just be a horse-laugh on us, but maybe it isn't as it should be. It isn't picking season around here yet, and by rights I don't think there should be anybody living in those shacks. I ... Oh, heck! Call me a curious cuss if you want to, but things like this get my curiosity clicking. I have to find out one way or the other."
"As though I hadn't known you long enough to realize that!" Freddy Farmer grunted, and began putting on his socks and shoes. "But for once I'm with you. It's aroused my curiosity, too. How do we operate? Walk right up there, or steal from bush to bush, your American Indian style?"
"Neither!" Dawson snapped, and pointed to their right. "We use our heads, instead! We go back that way and circle up the rise from that end. Then we walk along with the shacks covering us. That way, if we're surprised we can say that we were just taking a look at the lay-out. Just remember, one of them has a gun. And he might be the kind of a guy who asks questions afterward."
"And right you are, for a fact!" Freddy Farmer breathed, and tied the last shoelace. "Your way suits me quite all right. As you Yanks say, there's no need to have somebody pull our necks out."
"You and Yank lingo!" Dawson groaned. "But skip it. Let's go, and ... But, hey! What about your feet, Freddy?"
"They'll last," young Farmer assured him, and stood up. "It was only a pebble, anyway. Let's get going."
Only a pebble. Just a tiny fragment of stone. Yet the presence of that pebble in Freddy Farmer's shoe was to send them both into the Valley of Death, and perhaps even to change the entire course of the war in the Pacific!