“I say go on,” he remarked indifferently.

“Bear for me,” declared Jerry.

“How about you, Will?” asked Frank.

“Oh, I’m with Bluff this time.  If it was in the daytime, now, and I thought I could get a picture of the shoot, I might look at it differently.”

“You happen to have run out of flashlight cartridges, then?  That’s too bad!  Well, I side with Jerry,” remarked Frank, smiling.

“But that makes it a tie.  We’ll have to toss for it, fellows,” came from Will.

“You forget Joe, here.  Let him cast the deciding vote.  How, Joe?”

The boy grinned, and looked affectionately at Frank.

“I like bear steak,” he said simply.

“Hurrah!  That settles it, then!” shouted Jerry.

They just loafed through that day.

“Take it easy, boys.  Strenuous times may be ahead of us yet.  Who knows?  Besides, we are doing finely.  Half the time gone, and we’re surely more than half way along our journey, counting the river trip.  We can easily spare the day.”  And Frank set each to amusing himself after his own particular fashion.

Jerry went in the dinghy to try the fishing where the water was deeper, and it was not half an hour before they heard him yelling with delight as his little shallop was being towed around this way and that by a fish.

“Another shark!  He’d better cut loose!” exclaimed Will, in some alarm.

Joe shook his head.

“No shark this time.  I think he has got fast to a big channel bass.  It runs and then stops, then runs again.  Shark keeps on all the while,” he explained.

It proved to be the case, for when Jerry came back he proudly exhibited a monster bronze-backed prize that must have weighed more than thirty pounds.

Of course it was hung up, and a picture taken, with the gallant victor in the contest standing alongside, stout rod in hand.

So the evening came at last, and they turned their thoughts to big game.

Will and Bluff were elected to remain on board, as a penance for having voted against staying over.

“We’ll stand for that, all right; but if you should keel over a Bruin, don’t you fellows think we’re going to let you fool us out of our share of the prog,” said Bluff.

It took two trips of the dinghy to land the three hunters.  Of course, Joe had only gone along to see the fun, for he had no gun.

Still, he was capable of advancing some good suggestions, calculated to be of value to them while lying in ambush for the expected bear.  It was to be expected, for instance, that Bruin would make his appearance from the dense thicket beyond the bee tree, so the boys hid themselves in a semicircle, with the broken honey storehouse in plain view.

A fire had been started at a little distance, for otherwise they must have been in absolute darkness.  Joe said a little thing like that would not keep the bear from coming after he had gotten a good whiff of the powerful odor of sweetness that filled the air.