Piper groaned. “But I washed the dishes,” he almost wailed. “Say, unhook me, Sile, and let me out, or I’ll have a fit. I tell you there’s things crawling all over me, and they’re just chewing me up alive.” “You don’t suppose they’re ‘gougers,’ do you?” snickered Springer. “Oh, laugh—confound you, laugh!” snarled Sleuth furiously. “You think it’s a joke, don’t you?” “Sort of sus-seems that way to me,” admitted Phil. “Oh, say!” wailed the miserable fellow in the sleeping bag. “If I don’t get out of this thing I’ll go crazy. I tell you I’m being eaten up alive by something.” “Did you ever read a certain essay on the ‘Power of Imagination,’ Piper?” asked Stone. “If you ever have, you should realize that a person may make himself very miserable by conceiving all sorts of foolish things.” “No, I’ve never read your old essay,” howled Sleuth, thrashing around in the bag. “But I tell you this is no imagination; this is the real thing. Light the lantern, somebody, for the love of Mike! I’m burning up. I’m all afire.” “But there ain’t no fire in the bag—there can’t be,” asserted Crane relentlessly. “Just the same, somebody ought to git a bucket of water and souse him. P’r’aps that would keep him still.” Springer could hold himself in check no longer, and he burst into shrieks of laughter, during which Piper, kicking and floundering, rolled over and over until he was outside the tent. At this point Stone sprang up and hastened out to bend over the writhing victim, and the others, eager to see all there was to be seen, also rose and peered forth. It was with no small difficulty that Ben prevailed on Sleuth to keep quiet long enough for the mouth of the bag to be unfastened. When this was done, the boy inside scrambled forth, fiercely kicking the thing from him, and by the light of the fire he discovered a number of black ants running wildly about upon his person. “There they are!” he cried. “There’s what bit me! I told you something was doing it. Oh, murder! let me get out of my underclothes.” Frantically he stripped off every rag and stood stark naked in the firelight, still brushing and slapping and scratching. “Well, I swan to man!” said Crane, who had also come out of the tent. “If them ain’t ants, I’m a woodchuck. Haow do you s’pose they got into the bag?” “Must have been there a long tut-time,” said Springer. “Seems to me I’ve heard that one of the troubles with sleeping bags was that they made fuf-fine nests for ants and all sorts of insects. You’ll never gug-get me to sleep in one.” “You never will me—again,” vowed Piper. “Being eaten alive by ants is worse than being burned to the stake by redskins.” He was savagely shaking his underclothes as he spoke, having turned the garments inside out. Stone carried the sleeping bag some distance from the camp and flung it over the low limb of a tree, and the boys urged Piper to make sure there were no ants remaining upon his person or his underclothes before he re-entered the tent.