"So--so you were out on the lake this morning, studying pond life with the professor," he said, alluding to the Scoutmaster. "He's instructor in a college and each year he gets us started on something; last summer it was astronomy--he brought a small telescope along." Pem's heels drummed more excitedly on the sod--the starry heavens were _her_ scope. "But we have a good deal of fun with the big compound microscope, too--and more without it," acknowledged Studley. "Fancy last week we caught a huge pike which had jumped clear out of the water, on to the bank, after a water-hen!" "Where was that? How--how big was it?" The girlish questions mounted helter-skelter. "The pike? Oh! he weighed about fifteen pounds. It was right over there, on the other side of the lake," pointing to the spot where the party interested in egg-boats had landed that morning. "He--he gobbled the hen, too." "_Did_ he?" But he might have been threatening to gobble her, judging by the start which the girl gave at the moment. Her heart jumped down to the water's edge as abruptly as did the cliff beneath her. Her eyes were on a boat rowing out of the sunset's eye directly across the lake from that very spot. There was but one individual in it and he--he was rowing by instinct, as the birds fly, for his gaze was glued to a newspaper sheet, the sun's own evening edition, gorgeously printed by the painted rays in every hue of the spectrum. He was heading straight--straight for the floating wharf with its plank-bridge running out ashore. Jack at a Pinch again! "Do--do you know who he is?" Pem flashed the question upon the older of her two boy-knights. "Well-ll! I guess so." Stud's joy in the recognition floundered a little. "He--he's the fellow--one of the fellows--who boomed the aeroplane, the other day, to get you girls quietly out of the cave, when there was a 'rattler--'" "As if we'd have made a fuss, anyhow!" The girl's eyes blazed, again a patchwork, drawing their red center from the sun. "You said--you said that it was so hard to make friends with him, like whistling jigs to a milestone--ah!" Her own voice was suddenly stony. "Have you--oh! have you made any headway since?" "Humph! Yes. I've found out something about him." The patrol leader's preoccupied eyes were on the boat edging vaguely nearer to the wharf, with its one "nickum" figure, so nonchalantly rowing, so absorbed in the rainbowed sheet upon its knees that at this moment it awkwardly "caught a crab" and almost suggestively lost an oar. Simultaneously, however, the phonograph on the piazza struck up, as a prelude to festivities, the Virginia reel, the notes tripping gaily out across the painted lake; and the rower shot one glance upward, as if to say: "I'll be there in time!" then bent his hungry nose to the paper again. "What--what did you find out about him?" Pem's interest was equally hungry--positively famishing. "His name--eh?"