HE WHO LAUGHS LAST.
Two months later at Fort Good Faith, Dick received a letter which caused
him to exclaim excitedly and then call out in an eager voice to Sandy,
who stood just across the room conversing with a half-breed trapper from
Willing River.
“Sandy, come here!”
Dick’s chum swung obediently on his heel and hurried over.
“Yes, Dick. What’s up now?”
“A letter about the dinosaur,” explained Dick. “Arrived here just now
from the Canadian Geographical Society.”
Sandy’s expression changed suddenly from eagerness to surprise.
“Our dinosaur up there at the Lake of Many Islands!” he gasped.
Dick nodded. “The very same.”
“You mean to tell me you’ve been corresponding with the Canadian
Geographical Society about that mountain of bones?” inquired the other
wonderingly.
“Yes, Sandy, that’s what I’ve been doing.”
The next question was a very natural one:
“But why?”
“To prove the old saying that the man who laughs last laughs best,”
answered Dick enigmatically.
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean just this: Up until the time we encountered the dinosaur, we
never tackled any task we didn’t successfully finish. But that dinosaur
stuck us. We didn’t know how we’d get the brute out of the country. We
lost a certain amount of prestige when we set out upon that undertaking.
It made us look like fools. With the exception of Corporal Rand,
everybody had a good laugh over it.”
“But it was our first experience of the kind,” Sandy expostulated. “We
knew nothing about fossil hunting. Except in a hazy way, we didn’t even
know what a dinosaur was. The mistake was natural. I’ll admit that the
joke was on us, but almost anyone else, even an older person, might have
been taken in by it.”
“True enough, Sandy.” Dick’s hand rested lightly on his friend’s
shoulder. “Still I think you’ll agree with me that if we succeed in
getting the dinosaur away from the island, we can feel more like facing
the world again.”
“Well, what have you done about it? What does the letter say?”
Dick handed over the sheet of paper.
“Read it,” he said.
Ottawa, Canada,
August 2nd, 1923.
Mr. Richard Kent,
Fort Good Faith,
N. W. T.
Dear Sir:
In reply to your letter, dated June 27th, I wish to say that our society
is very much interested in your proposal and early next spring will
undertake the preliminary work of exhuming, crating and shipping the
fossil you have described. Our representative, Mr. Claymore, has been
instructed to proceed at once to Fort Good Faith, where he will arrive
about September 1st to take up with you more fully the project of
transporting the dinosaur from Half Way River to the end-of-steel at
Peace River Crossing.
Yours very truly,
(Signed) L. P. Graham,
Secretary for the Society.
Sandy glanced up when he had finished reading, thoughtfully folded the
letter and handed it back to his chum.
“I suppose you know what you’re doing, Dick. Made all your plans?”
Dick nodded emphatically. “Yes, down to the last detail.”
“Taking Toma and me with you?”—a slight frown and an assumed air of
great indifference.
“You bet I am,” grinned Dick. “You ought to know that without asking.
You and Toma are to furnish the brains for my working party.”
THE END
Transcriber’s Notes
--Copyright notice provided as in the original—this e-text is public
domain in the country of publication.
--Silently corrected palpable typos; left non-standard (or amusing)
spellings and dialect unchanged.
--Added a Table of Contents based on chapter headings.
--In the text versions, delimited italics text in _underscores_ (the
HTML version reproduces the font form of the printed book.)
End of Project Gutenberg's Dick Kent at Half-Way House, by Milton Richards