“Well, we can’t help that, you know, but I move we send all the ghosts over into the belfry.”
“Can you do it?” asked Val, with a look of admiring faith at his wonderful companion.
“Yes,” said Bar. “We must take home with us that extra length of anchor-rope. It’s small and strong. Just the thing. Then we must get some bits of wood and a yard or two of canvas, and we can do it.”
“Puff Evans has a regular workshop down by his house,” said Val. “He’s a kind of a genius in his way, if he only knew what work meant.”
“Let’s fish, then,” exclaimed Bar, “and I’ll study hard. We shan’t have an hour to spare.”
It was a curious piece of business, that Latin grammar, lying flat on the seat in front of Bar Vernon, as he sat in the stern of the boat, with his quick eyes glancing from that to the float of his fish-line.
Nevertheless, the pages were turned pretty fast, from time to time, and every now and then a perch or a sunfish would come flopping in over the side of the boat and be promptly transferred to Puff Evans’s well-contrived “fish-car,” just aft of the centre-board. Val, too, sitting at the prow, was getting very fair luck, only that he would lose some of his best bites in watching Bar and wondering what might be the nature of the trap that he was planning for the benefit of the ghosts and the Academy bell.
“Do you understand what you’re reading?” he asked, at length.
“Of course not,” replied Bar. “It’s all I can do to remember it. Mr. Brayton doesn’t expect me to understand it at one reading. He told me so.”
“I don’t suppose he expects you to remember it, either,” said Val. “It’s a good deal more than I could do.”