“Now tell us about your getting home,” broke in Kittie. “We’re more interested in that than in your ‘Red Mountain.’ Did you sleep any, poor boys?”
“Not very much,” laughed Fred. “The mosquitoes settled down to business pretty soon after midnight, and made things lively. Baranov had some pieces of netting, and we put them over our heads, but they didn’t seem to do much good.”
“They say the Alaskan mosquitoes are so intelligent,” remarked Rossiter, “that two of them will hold the wings of a third close to his body, and push him through the meshes of a net. That accounts for their neighborliness in your camp. Go on with the story.”
“My leg hurt so that I couldn’t sleep much,” said Tom, taking up the narrative again. “Whenever I did dose for a few minutes, I would wake up with a start and see Solomon putting on another log. I don’t believe he slept a wink all night.
“Toward morning Fred and I both got a good nap of nearly an hour. When I opened my eyes, I looked for Solomon, but he wasn’t in sight”—
“Then of course he must wake me,” interrupted Fred, “and I had to get up and put wood on the fire, lest that His Royal Highness should feel cold. I had just got a good blaze going when Baranov hove in sight, with a big bear steak in one hand and a string of trout in the other.
“‘Where in the world did you get those fish?’ Tom sung out.
“‘Oh! back here a piece, in a leetle pool I knew about,’ says Solomon. ‘I ’lowed we’ll have a dish o’ fried traouts fer breakfast, ef the brook hedn’t dried up.’”
There was a shout at Fred’s imitation of Baranov’s tone.