“Aw, forget the old bear! Don’t seem so bad, now it’s daylight. Say,—not a peep, remember, about that old bear.”
“I won’t say anything if you don’t,” Joe promised.
They rowed back now, and found the boat-keeper up. Bob explained why they took the boat, and paid the rental for it, and for the fish-pole. The man was good-natured and made no complaint.
“Guess it’s all right,” he said. “’Course, if you hadn’t got a fish I’d had to charge you more.”
“I suppose if we’d got two fish you’d have given us the boat free,” Bob laughed.
They carried their stuff back to the stable, where the rest of the packs were, and had returned to the hotel lobby and were busily writing souvenir postcards to all their friends back at home when the party came down to breakfast.
“Hullo, boys!” everybody said. “Where’s that fish?”
Bob rubbed his stomach.
“Did you really get one?” Lucy demanded. “And you’ve eaten it all yourselves? Oh, you mean, greedy things!”
“Well,” Bob declared, “you folks wouldn’t camp with us. Go in and eat your old canned peaches and hunks of whisk broom and condensed cream. Gee, Joe ’n’ I have had some night, all right! Old Big Ben woke us up——”