“If we don’t mean to keep Lon waiting, we’d better adjourn the meeting,” he remarked. “But your notion may be all right, Sam—you’ve traces of brains now and then. Only, your way isn’t exactly quick action. It’s going to call for time, maybe a long time. And meanwhile we won’t be really enjoying life.”
Sam rose, too. “Yes, we’re due to start, if we’re to catch Lon,” he said. “But if any of you fellows can offer a better scheme——”
“We can’t!” said Orkney crisply.
“Then you’re ready to try my way, even if it may seem slow?”
“Yes,” said the club, in chorus. “We’ll try it.”
CHAPTER V
LON GOES SCOUTING
With Lon Gates it was not a case of “out of sight, out of mind,” so far as Sam was concerned.
For years Lon had taken a very keen interest in the fortunes and misfortunes of Sam and his friends, had served as their confidant and counselor, and had shared in some of their adventures. Natural shrewdness and long acquaintance combined to give him a rather remarkable insight into their problems, which he found peculiarly entertaining, on occasion. Lon, as he sometimes confessed, “liked to figger out things.” It tickled his sense of humor, and possibly an innocent vanity, now and then to do a little detective work, so to speak; get to the bottom of some case in which the boys were concerned; then amaze them by putting his knowledge to their practical service.
In the present instance Lon was disposed to regard Sam’s difficulty as presumably fairly serious. Putting one thing with another, he inclined to the theory that it grew out of incidents at school. Sam plainly regarded the trouble—whatever it might be—as real. Lon ran over in mind the chances for friction in studies, in athletics, in what may be called the social side of school life. So far as he had heard from the boys of the club, none of these offered especially rough places. He inferred that whatever had happened, had happened unexpectedly and recently; doubtless, within a few hours. Lon whistled softly.
“They say it’s pooty near unanimously voted that it takes two to make a quarrel,” he soliloquized. “There’ll be Sam and his crowd, and there’ll be the other fellers. And mebbe the others’ll be talkin’. I dunno of no jest cause and impediment why I shouldn’t listen and keep my eyes doin’ business as usual. And so—let’s see—what we’ll see.”