"Better not," warned Will again. "This ain't your country, Jud. Pinto seemed to know what he was talking about. Let's wait until the professor gets back."
"Pinto will never win any Carnegie medals, an' I guess I can take a bath without gettin' permission from the perfesser," returned Jud, obstinately. "However," he went on, "just to show you that the old man never takes any chances, I'll poke a stick around in this pool to drive out the devil-fish that may be hidin' here."
Nothing happened as the old man prodded the water with a long branch cut from a near-by tree, except that the motion of the stick seemed to attract more and more of the chubby fish which he had first seen from the outer channel into the pool.
"Gee," remarked Jud, "but those fish are tame! I'll bet if I had a hook an' line I could flick out a dozen. Better come in with me, Bill," he went on. "I promised your family that I'd see that you boys took plenty of baths an' kept your hair brushed all through this trip."
"I'll wait till the boss comes back," said Will, laughingly.
That was enough for Jud.
"I'm my own boss!" he remarked indignantly, and waded in with a cake of tree-grown soap clenched tightly in one hand.
His first step took him well above his knees. There was a swirl and a flash from the center of the pool, and in an instant the whole surface was alive with a furious rush of the short, deep-bodied fish toward Jud. As they approached, the old man noticed uneasily their staring, malignant eyes, and that they had projecting, gaping lower jaws, thickly set with razor-edged, triangular teeth.
Suddenly the whole school were upon him, crowding into the shallow water where he stood and snapping at his bare legs like mad dogs. Before he could stir, two of them had bitten pieces of flesh out of the calves of both of his legs. As the blood from their bites touched the surface of the pool, the fish seemed to go entirely mad, snapping their fierce jaws frantically and even springing clear of the water, like trout leaping at a fly.
If they had not been so numerous that they jostled each other, or if Jud had not been quicker than most men twenty years younger, he would have been terribly mutilated. As it was, when he finally reached the safety of the bank, the water which he had just left boiled and bubbled like a caldron, and two of the fish followed him so closely that they landed, flapping, snapping, and squealing, far up on the white sand.