“Then you might join Dan in being a day laborer,” teased Dick laughingly.

“Oh, no!  I want to use my brain along with my muscles, and that’s why I’m going to be a civil engineer.”

“Army a Navy officers may have had an easy time of it once,” Dave went on warmly, but times have changed.  Our fighting men, to-day, are obliged to hustle all the time to keep up with the march and progress of science.  I asked an Army officer, once, what he did in his spare time.  He looked at me rather queerly, then replied, ‘I sleep.’”

“He was lazy as well as offensively neat, then,” laughed Tom.  “As for me, I enjoy my old clothes, and that is one of the reasons why I’m having so much fun out of this trip.  I don’t have to dress up!”

“You’d feel first rate if you could be dressed up for a few hours, go into a hotel dining room, have a good meal and then slip into a ballroom for a dance,” laughed Prescott.

“Bosh!” flared Tom.  “I’m no dandy, and all I want is to be a man.”

“How do you stand, Harry?” grinned Dave Darrin.  “Do you agree with Tom that dirt is the best stuff with which to decorate one’s clothing?”

“I never said that,” broke in Tom hotly.  “I’m as ready for a bath and clean clothing as any of you.  I like to wear old clothes—–­not soiled ones!”

“If anyone happens to overhear us talking,” laughed Hazy, “he’ll think that we’re all planning to take up prize fighting as our work in life.”

“I don’t like to hear the officers of the Army and Navy scoffed at as a lot of idling, time-wasting dandies,” Darry asserted.

“And I don’t like to be accused of liking dirt on my clothes, just because I am going to be a civil engineer,” Tom explained in a milder voice.

An ideal bit of green forest, at the edge of a limpid lake, appealed to Dick & Co. as the noon stopping place.

“I’ve a good mind to fish,” remarked Danny Grin.

“Go ahead, if you want to,” Dick assented, “but we’ve got a lot of fresh meat that we simply must cook this noon, for it may not keep until night.”

“It would take you an hour or more, even though the fish bit readily, to catch enough fish to feed this little multitude,” Tom remarked.

“I don’t want to wait that long for my meal to-day.”

“I don’t believe I want to wait, either,” Dalzell agreed, and gave up the idea of fishing.

Luncheon went on in record time that morning.  It was not later than half-past eleven o’clock when they sat down to the meal, and but a few minutes past noon when the dishes were stacked up, ready to be washed.

“Whizz-zz!” whistled Dave, as the sounds made by a swiftly driven automobile reached their ears.  “Someone is hurrying to get his noon meal.  Just hear that old spurt wagon throb!”

The boys sat some hundred feet in from the highway.   The automobile
did not interest them much until-----

Bang!