"Some night around the camp-fire I'll tell you," he said. "We were fishing off Sea Gate and the fish just stood on line waiting for a chance to bite. We sold three boatfuls in the one day and whacked up about seventy dollars--what do you think of that? Then we chugged around into Coney for gas and on the way back we got mussed up with the tide and were carried out to sea--banged around for three days, bailing and trying to fry fish on the muffler. On the fourth day we were picked up by a fishing schooner about fifty miles off Rockaway and towed in. I said to Jakey, I'm Mike Corby, remember that, and if you give your right name I'll kill you--you've got to protect me,' I said, 'because I'm in bad.' You see how it was, kiddo? I was three days overdue at camp and didn't even have my uniform. I was so tired bailing and standing lookout that when they set us down on the wharf at Rockaway, I could have slept standing on my head. And I've gone without sleep fifty hours at a stretch on the West Front in France--would you believe it?" "Sure, I believe it," I told him. "I'll tell you the whole business some day when you and I are on the hike." I said, "Cracky, you can bet I'd like to go on a hike with you." "That's what we will," he said, "and we'll swap adventures." I told him I didn't have any good ones like he had to swap, but anyway, I was glad he got home all right. "_All right!_" he said, "you mean all _wrong_. Maybe you saw the accounts in the papers of the two fishermen who were picked up after a _harrowing experience_--Mike Corby and Dan McCann. That was us. I left Jakey down at Rockaway to wait for his engine to be fixed and beat it out to Jersey. _No house-boat_! Was I up in the air? Didn't even dare to go up to the house and ask about it. That rotten little newspaper in Bridgeboro had a big headliner about me disappearing--'_never seen after leaving Camp Dix; whereabouts a mystery_'--that's what it said, '_son of Professor Donnelle_.' What'd you think of that?" I told him I was mighty sorry for him, and I was, too. Then he said how he went to New York in those old rags, and tried not to see anybody he knew and even he hid his face when he saw Mr. Cooper on the train. And then he telephoned out to Bridgeboro and Little Valley and made believe he was somebody else, and said he heard the houseboat was for sale and in that way he found out about his father loaning it to our troop, and how we were probably anchored near St. George at Staten Island. Oh, boy, didn't he hurry up to get there, because he was afraid we might be gone.