For the next few days the adventures of that fire were the sole subject
of conversation. Hazen, the official historian, devoted all his spare
time to writing up the details in the official scrapbook and they lost
nothing of their vividness in the process. It was wonderful, now that it
was all over, to see how they had enjoyed that gruelling work on the
fireline. Scott wrote home an account of the fire which perfectly
confirmed his parents in their belief in the woolliness of the West, but
left them undecided as to whether the fire had been a catastrophe
narrowly prevented by almost superhuman efforts or a harmless scheme
devised for the amusement of the students. Such were the views of the
fire, now that it was past history and the frequent rains precluded its
repetition, but it was a notable fact that throughout the remainder of
the summer no one was heard to wish for another.
The ground had thawed out sufficiently for the nursery work and the boys
were spending their days busily in the seed beds.
The novelty of the work in the nursery had made it interesting at first,
but otherwise it was not very fascinating, and on the fourth day it was
getting monotonous. Each crew of two had thoroughly spaded up a bed four
feet wide by fifty feet long and had bordered them with boards on edge,
which Professor Mertz required to be set with excruciating exactness.
The boys declared that he could smell the slightest deviation in one of
those boards.
The beds thus prepared had then to be covered with a layer of carefully
prepared manure and that in turn covered with a layer of well sifted
sandy loam. The dirt sifting soon became monotonous and monotony in that
crowd necessitated some side line to keep up the interest. Fourteen
ingenious minds were looking for some opportunity to put a little spice
into the mechanical labor.
Morris straightened his long angular frame stiffly, stretching his tired
arms over his head and gazing straight into the zenith in his effort to
relax every muscle he had been straining over that sand sifter. The
action exposed very prominently a leather thong attached to the ring of
a large silver watch. The chance for a joke seemed slight, but it was no
time to neglect the slightest opportunity. Bill Price grabbed the thong
with the quickness of a cat and was surprised to find how easily the
watch slipped from Morris’s pocket to his own.
Several saw the transfer and prepared to elaborate the joke. Hazen,
working on the next bed, took a stretch. “Gee, but this is a long day.
What time is it getting to be, Morris?”
Morris felt confidently in the accustomed pocket for his watch. His
fingers fumbled there persistently for a minute before he realized that
the watch really was not there. At the mention of the time all within
hearing had looked up: they were all interested in the time.
Morris felt doubtfully in his other pockets. He was the legitimate butt
of many of the camp jokes, and a wink from Price told all the others
that something was up.
“I don’t know,” Morris answered hesitatingly, “I’ve lost my watch.”
“Lost it?” Price exclaimed. “When did you have it last?”
“Looked at it just a little while ago.”
“Haven’t been away from here, have you?” Hazen asked.
“Only down to the dirt pile.”
“Must have fallen out of your pocket when you were leaning over the
bed,” Greenleaf suggested.
“Don’t see how it could fall out on this bare ground without my seeing
it,” Morris objected. “There is nothing around here to hide it.”
Bill Price was equal to the occasion. “Perhaps you covered it up in the
beds. You’ve been sifting sand over them. Might have dropped right under
the sifter,” he suggested.
“Yes, that might be,” Morris acknowledged, ruefully looking over the
broad expanse of beds. “It’ll be pretty hard to locate it.”
“I should think you could hear it,” Merton said, “it can’t be covered
more than half an inch.”
Morris grasped at the possibility. “By George, that’s right,” he said.
“You’ve only sifted these four beds, haven’t you?” Price asked
encouragingly.
“Yes,” Morris answered after thinking a minute, “only these four here.”
While the rest of the fellows gagged themselves or rolled ecstatically
in some out of the way corner, Morris jack-knifed his gaunt length over
the bed and, with his ear close to the ground, occasionally scooping up
a little loose sand, weaved his way slowly up the long bed. The
lowliness of his head and the extreme length of his thighs caused him to
present a most remarkable figure. This queer position coupled with the
set expression of intent listening threw the boys almost into
convulsions.
Slowly he went up one bed and down the other without varying his
tiresome procedure in the least.
“Reminds me of a spring robin looking for worms,” Merton said. “You’ll
see him pull one up in a minute.”
“If you can’t hear that watch there,” Bill Price called sympathetically,
“go out in the brush and hear a wood tick.”
“Why don’t you give him that watch, Hazen?” Greenleaf called across from
another bed. “He’ll break his back in a minute.”
But Morris was not the man to leave a thing half done. He covered those
four beds conscientiously, and rose with a groan only when he was sure
that the beloved watch must be hiding elsewhere.
“Seems queer where it could have gotten to,” he mused. “It ticks pretty
loud, and I could have heard it if it had been there. The only other
place it could be is in the sand pile. You fellows be careful how you
shovel in that pile.”
He returned to his job of sifting dirt over the bed, but kept an eye on
the sand pile and shouted wrathful warnings every time anyone went near
it. Of course they all took occasion to go there as much as possible and
jabbed the shovel around recklessly.
Price was working with Morris. One of them brought the dirt from the
pile while the other sifted it onto the beds. They shifted frequently,
for the sifting work was very tiresome. Price watched his opportunity,
slipped the watch into a shovelful of sand and dumped it carefully into
the screen. Everyone stood at attention. Two or three shakes of the
screen and the silver twinkled through the sand.
Morris’s face beamed at the sight of it. Amidst profound silence he
examined the watch minutely. “Not a scratch on it,” he announced
innocently. “I don’t see how it escaped, the way you fellows have been
jabbing around that sand pile. I remember feeling it drop now, but I did
not realize what it was at the time.”
For a moment it looked as though there would be a general outburst, but
the fellows all changed their minds and decided to keep it for the next
year’s banquet.
That joke livened up the crowd and before the effects of it had worn off
Professor Roberts arrived to take up the work of forest mensuration. The
boys welcomed the change because it took them into the woods on all day
expeditions. They packed their lunches, slung them on the back of their
belts, and felt that they were good for all day no matter where they
were called upon to go. Sometimes they traveled all day on foot, more
often they took the scow to some distant point on the lake before
striking into the woods, but no matter how they started they were always
certain of new adventures.
One day as they were returning pretty tired from section 36 a fox
terrier that had joined the camp as a volunteer was poking busily around
all the bunches of brush looking for excitement. Scott watched him in
disgust as he ducked into one clump after another with undiminished
energy and rose frantically on his hind legs in his vain efforts to
follow some little chickadee into a neighboring tree.
“That dog makes me sick,” Scott remarked to Price in deep disgust. “He’s
been trying to fly all day and he hasn’t been three feet off the ground
yet.”
“Couldn’t do much better yourself,” Bill answered drily.
“Well,” Scott retorted, “I should at least know it by this time. Why
don’t he hunt something his own size instead of chasing those pesky
little bunches of feathers? If he were any good he would scare up some
real game instead of wasting his energy on those things.” The dog had
picked out Bill for his temporary adviser, as far as a fox terrier
permits himself to be advised by anyone, and Scott was attempting to use
him for a club to get a “rise” out of Bill.
Just then the dog made two or three stiff-legged bounces in the brush as
though in an apparent endeavor to see something on the ground beyond.
“By George,” Bill exclaimed, “if he tackles that porcupine he’ll have
something more than his size. Come here, you crazy Jehu, and let that
pincushion alone.”
“Don’t worry,” Scott assured him, “no animal will touch one of those
things.”
But a fox terrier is governed by no laws, natural or otherwise. The
porcupine had chattered his teeth defiantly and the dog, heedless of the
warning shouts, flung himself upon the first game he had found that
could not fly. The porcupine uttered a plaintive whimper, turned his
back on the dog with astonishing agility and struck him full in the face
with one blow of his powerful tail. The dog did not wait for more. With
one astonished yelp he jumped into the brush regardless of direction or
obstacles and continued his course due east at a terrific pace as far as
they could see him.
“Running a pretty good compass course,” Bill remarked. “He ought to be
showing up over there in the west pretty soon; it won’t take him long to
go around the earth at that rate.”
“Poor little chap,” Scott muttered. “I wonder if any of those quills got
him in the eye? There must have been a dozen of them in his face.”
“A dozen,” Bill exclaimed. “Ask him. I’ll bet he thinks there are a
thousand.”
“If he comes back to camp we can pull them out for him,” Scott said.
“Yes, but if he runs like that for an hour it will take him a week of
ordinary travel to get back.”
In the meanwhile the porcupine had turned quietly to his own peaceful
pursuits, chattering and whimpering up a young pine tree and stopping
for a nibble or two at the bark as he went. He had apparently forgotten
the existence of the dog and cared not a rap of his prickly tail for
anything else alive.
But the dog had by no means forgotten him.
When the boys arrived in camp a half-hour later they discovered a white
patch lying beside the pump in a puddle of water.
“Look there,” Scott exclaimed, “there’s the dog. He looks sort of
tired.”
“Probably ran a hundred miles,” Bill commented. “Let’s see if he has
shaken all those quills.”
The dog, lying in a position of exhausted prostration, paid no attention
to them. Tired out as he was he held his head wearily up from the
ground.
“Gee, look at those quills,” Scott cried excitedly.
“Has more in his head than the porcupine,” Bill said. He stepped forward
and tried to pull out one of the quills. With a yelp of pain the dog
snapped at him viciously. “They won’t pull out and they must hurt him
worse than tight shoes. I wonder how we can get them out?”
Just then Professor Mertz appeared with an armful of gunny sacks and a
pair of pliers. “Do you fellows want to take a hand in a surgical
operation?” he asked.
“Sure,” Bill said. “We saw how he got ’em in, and now we’d like to see
how you get ’em out.” He told the story of the brief, one-sided battle.
“He certainly has his share of them,” said the Professor. “His eyes seem
to be swollen shut, and it is little short of a miracle if there is not
a quill in them. We’ll do our best for him, but he’ll be a pretty sick
dog even if it does not kill him.”
As Professor Mertz talked he slipped several layers of sacking under the
dog’s body and wrapped him in it, securely binding his legs to his body.
The dog, seeming to realize that someone was trying to help him,
submitted quietly.
“Now you fellows wrap a lot of this sacking around your hands so that he
cannot bite you and hold him as still as you can while I try to get at
those quills. He’ll probably fight pretty hard.”
When the dog was securely pinioned Professor Mertz cautiously fastened
the pinchers on a quill in the dog’s nose and pulled. With a yelp of
pain the dog snapped wildly and made a desperate struggle to get away.
The boys were surprised to see how hard the quills pulled till a careful
examination showed the dozens of little barbs turned viciously backward.
The operation was repeated again and again. A close examination
discovered an almost innumerable number of quills. Some of them pierced
the under jaw and protruded into the mouth, some which struck the roof
of the mouth poked their vicious points through the skin on top of the
nose, still others pierced the lips and tongue, while countless others
stuck up in the face and ears like pins in a crowded cushion. Overcome
by the pain the dog ceased his struggles and only emitted a plaintive
whimper as the venomous little barbs were drawn.
“Don’t you know that hurts?” Scott said, as he watched how the skin was
drawn to a point on the extraction of each quill. “I don’t see how he
can stand it.”
Price was silently counting the quills. “Ninety-six,” he announced as
Professor Mertz drew the last visible barb. “Just think of it.
Ninety-six in that little space, and with one slap of that clumsy tail.”
By that time most of the boys had come in and were standing around in a
wondering group listening to the oft-repeated story of the encounter,
and marveling at the number of quills. The poor dog seemed to have given
up completely. He no longer made the slightest move or demonstration. He
apparently had no interest in anything. His face was swollen till his
eyes were completely shut and the blood trickled freely from the dozens
of little punctures. Professor Mertz bathed the fevered head and gently
carried the patient over to a quiet corner of the shed.
“Now,” he said, “you boys want to be careful how you touch him for a
week or two. I have pulled out all the quills in sight, but there are
probably some others in his flesh which will gradually work to the
surface and if you should happen to strike one of them in patting him he
would probably bite you—for they make a nasty sore.”
For the next week Bobs was a pretty sick dog, and seemed to take very
little interest in life. For a while they thought he must die, but he
gradually improved and when it was possible to examine him carefully it
was found that both his eyes had escaped injury. The boys were very
careful of him. As Professor Mertz had predicted, every now and then
during the next three weeks a gingerly inspection brought to light the
points of quills in locations which showed that they had worked
mercilessly through the flesh for some considerable distance. It was at
least a month before he became once more his old light-hearted self and
even then Bill Price could throw him into a violent fit of trembling by
chattering his teeth like a porcupine.