When the boat landed by the rocks such a scene ensued as no pen can describe. The men crowded about Randy with eager congratulations, and fairly pumped his arms off.
Mose Hocker snatched the gun and waved it triumphantly before Daddy Perkiss.
"What do you think of that?" he cried. "The lad brought it clean up from the bottom of Rudy's hole. I'll take that ten pounds of terbacker, Daddy, as soon as you please."
"Shoo, now! thar's some trick about the thing," mumbled the old man petulantly. "You can't make me believe that Rudy's Hole ain't two or three hundred feet deep."
"But here's the gun to prove it," said Mose, "an' we all saw the lad bring it up. Let him speak for himself, and say whether he touched bottom or not."
"Of course I touched bottom," returned Randy with a slight shiver at the recollection. "It was the biggest dive I ever made. The water must be fifteen or twenty feet deep. It's not any more than that, though. I thought I'd never come to the top the second time. I was just ready to burst when I found the gun, and the weight of it kept me from coming up rapidly."
Daddy heard the lad through, and then, with a contemptuous sniff, he rose and hobbled up the path.
"Don't forgit the terbacker," Mose Hocker shouted after him.
The old man made no reply, and was soon out of sight.
"It's a hard blow for Daddy," said one of the fishermen, "an' the same in fact fur all of us, I reckon. I've been brung up from a lad in the full belief that Rudy's Hole were well nigh bottomless."