Mr. Codling found the litter much more comfortable.
By taking things easy, and changing stretcher-bearers frequently, as one or the other showed signs of tiring out, they managed to reach the road, and later on a farm-house where the owner agreed to use his own old car to take Amos and his injured parent to Chester.
The last Elmer, Wee Willie and Perk saw of them they were waving their hands wildly from the “tin Lizzie” as the car started noisily down the road leading to Chester, some twenty-three miles distant, by way of Crawford Notch.
“Well,” said Perk, after they started back to the cabin, carrying the supplies purchased from the farmer on the stretcher, “that winds up one of the most thrilling happenings that ever came our way. As long as I live I’ll never forget how I fetched him to my fire, and then discovered that it was Amos’s long-missing dad. But it’s all right now, boys.”
“Yes,” chimed in Wee Willie, merrily, “everything is lovely and the goose hangs high. Just to think of it, how bully things turned out, with him fetching back a regular fortune with him, or papers to show he’s got it in bank up there in Alaska, which means the same thing.”
“Beats any movie picture I ever stared at with goggle-eyes,” Perk went on to confess, with his customary frankness; and then gave a sigh, adding: “but it’s all over now, and I reckon the rest of our stay up here will be just along the usual humdrum lines of camping. Still, we have to eat, so I’ll have my chance for getting up new and novel dishes to try on the dog.”
The others only laughed to hear him talk; for they knew Perk too well to feel offended at anything he said. But, indeed, Perk need not have feared a humdrum existence, if only he could have lifted the curtain of the immediate future.
And if the reader feels any curiosity to learn about how Wee Willie startled his camp-mates with a mutiny; as well as the strange series of thrilling events that made their further stay in the wilderness something never to be forgotten, all this and much more will be found detailed at length in the volume that follows this, under the suggestive title of “The Camp Fire Boys in Muskrat Swamp; or, A Hunt for the Missing ’Plane Pilot.”