“The only way anyone should do,” declared Dolph, earnestly. “I hate to see fish gasping their lives away in the sun. Besides, they’d flop all over and keep up the worst racket you ever heard. When you’re fishing, you had ought never to knock the boat more than you can help. Sound travels through the water like everything.”
“You never said a truer thing, Dolph, and I know it,” declared Teddy, as they paddled for the camp landing place.
“Going to change your clothes?” asked the other, laughing again.
“Oh! I guess not, they can dry on me, all right. Laugh all you want to, Dolph. It’s a good joke, that’s certain. And I reckon Amos—listen, I wonder if that was him firing, and what he found to shoot at. Amos wouldn’t dream of killing a deer in the close season.”
“Not unless he was nearly starving, and needed food. But Teddy, somehow or other I don’t believe that was Amos shooting.”
“Why do you say that?” asked the other.
“Because I’m sure I heard two reports, one right after the other,” Dolph went on.
“You mean that Amos only carries a single shot gun; but that’s where you’re mistaken, my boy. He took my Marlin repeater along. I told him to carry it the next time he went off.”
“Still, the shots were so close together, one gun couldn’t have made them, unless it was a double-barreled scatter gun. Perhaps we’re not the only ones around here. We happen to know about Gabe Hackett, and he said he was on the way to visit a friend’s cabin, a man named Crawley.”