Then I left bashful as anything, and just stood there beside him while he kept weaving back and forth with his hands still on the flag pole, neither one of us saying a word; and the waves of the lake made a friendly sound, lapping against the dock posts and washing against the sandy shore. Well, the gang was yelling from the tents for us to hurry and come on and go to bed, so Tom and I started to walk back to shore and toward the Indian fire. The fire was still alive although the flames were kinda lazy, and the big blue cloud of smoke that had been hanging above our camp was mixed up with the night sky seemed to be gone. Tom and I stopped beside the fire a minute and looked down into it. Then just like he’d done before, he picked up a stick and shoved it into the coals, and a whole lot of sparks came out and shot in different directions of up, toward the sky. “Hey you--Bill,” Big Jim called to me from his tent, “it’s your turn to put out the fire--the water pail is here in Barry’s tent--” which is what we had to do every night with our camp fires, pour water on them, so there wouldn’t be any danger of them suddenly coming to life in a wind and starting a forest fire. It didn’t take me long to get the water pail, dip up some water from the lake and pour it on that fire till there wasn’t even one tiny spark visible. Little Jim came out and went along with me as I made two or three trips from the fire to the lake and back carrying water. As you know, Little Jim had been sleeping in Big Jim’s tent, with Tom Till, and also Barry Boyland. The rest of us--in fact, our whole Robinson Crusoe gang--slept in the other tent--my two goats and my Man Friday and me. “There’s something I want to ask you,” Little Jim said to me just as I was about to leave him at his tent. “What?” I said. “Can I play Robinson Crusoe with you tomorrow?” I was dumbfounded, “What?” I said. “Who told you about--our game?” “I just guessed it,” he said, “when Dragonfly said you walked on his neck and he was a Negro, and that they’d been trying to make soup out of him.” I wouldn’t promise him, ’cause I wasn’t sure what my Man Friday and my two goats would think of the idea, but later when my goats and my Man Friday and I were alone in our tent, we talked it over and Friday said, “Let’s let him--and he can be _my_ slave.” Poetry spoke up from his sleeping bag beside me and said, “Let’s let ’im ’cause he didn’t get to help us find the little Ostberg girl, and he wasn’t even with us when we caught the kidnapper himself in the Indian cemetery!” So that was that. We wouldn’t take Tom Till along, though, on account of we didn’t want him to know his daddy was up here, and might be mixed up with the kidnapping mystery. Also for some reason it didn’t seem right to me to have Big Jim come along and be our leader, when Robinson Crusoe had to be the leader himself. Boy oh boy! I could hardly wait till tomorrow!