“I guess what I need to take the kinks out of my back is exercise,” Bennie remarked, with a grin.
“We’d better get hold of Jack Dempsey, and let Bennie box with him every day,” Mr. Stone put in.
“Aw, I wouldn’t want to hurt him,” Bennie answered. “What we going to do today, Uncle Bill?”
“We’ll have to think it over,” his uncle replied.
But before anything was decided, a bell-boy came from the hotel with the news that someone had been taken sick there, and asking the doctor to come right over. It turned out that a man who had arrived the night before had eaten something on the road that poisoned him, and he was so sick that the doctor didn’t dare go far from camp that day. Mr. Stone wanted to stay near camp also, to make motion pictures of parties climbing up and down the rim, and he needed Lester to help him. So Bennie and Spider asked if they might go down to the water, get a boat, and row across the lake, taking their lunch with them.
“I don’t know,” the doctor said, frowning. “You can both swim, and you know how to row, but that lake can get pretty rough, and if you’re forced to land, there’s no way of getting back till somebody can come after you.”
“Oh, but look at the old lake! It’s calm as a mirror,” Bennie pleaded, “and there’s not a cloud in the sky.”
“We want to see what Llao Rock looks like when you’re right under it,” Spider added. “We’ll be awful careful.”
“Will you promise to keep fairly near shore, and if the water gets rough to beat it for home?” the doctor asked.
“Sure we will.”