After the departure of their guest, it was only natural that he should be the subject of conversation about the fire as the four chums lay there taking things easy.

“Max, honest to goodness now,” Bandy-legs remarked, “do you really take any stock in that fairy story he told us about an imaginary fur farm?  It struck me Obed is givin to yarnin’ just for the love of it.  All that stuff about his relatives may have been true, and again only nonsense.  It’s my opinion there isn’t any Granddad Grimes, or Uncle Hiram, Nicodemus and so forth.  He grinned like everything when he was reeling those names off so slick.  Yes, he was stringing us, I bet you.”

“W-w-why,” burst out Toby just then, “who wouldn’t have to s-s-snicker when he had a w-w-whole lot of relations with such f-f-funny names!  It’d make me grin from ear to ear every time I h-h-happened to think of ’em.  You’re the greatest hand to s-s-suspect anybody I ever s-s-saw, Bandy-legs.  Now, I want you to k-k-know that I think Obed the s-s-straight g-g-goods, and I’m taking a heap of s-s-stock in seeing that bully f-f-fur f-f-farm of his tomorrow; ain’t you, Max?”

“Certainly I am,” replied the other, without a second’s hesitation.  “In the first place, Bandy-legs, you must understand that nobody could talk so interestingly on a subject unless he knew a lot about it.  He told us a dozen things about fur farming that I never heard before.”

“Huh! and perhaps nobody else ever heard of them either, Max,” grunted the far from satisfied Bandy-legs.

“Nothing will ever satisfy him except he sees those kit foxes with his own eyes,” asserted Steve, almost indignantly, “handles them with his own paws, and asks every little critter whether he really belongs to Obed Grimes.  Bandy-legs is the worst Doubting Thomas going, when the fit comes on him.”

Even this sort of talk did not convince the objector.

“Say what you will, fellows,” Bandy-legs went on, stubbornly, “there’s a wheen of queer things connected with this same Obed Grimes, and I won’t take that back till he shows us his wonderful old farm, where he raises black foxes for the fur market.  Stop and think how mysteriously he popped in on us, will you?  Why, he as much as owned up that he had been spying on us for a long time.  If Toby here hadn’t discovered him peeking, and pointed that way, chances are he wouldn’t have shown up at all.  Now, what made him snoop around our camp like that?”

“Say, didn’t he explain all that just as straight as a die?” objected Steve, who seemed to have conceived quite a fancy for Obed Grimes, the woods boy.  “He told us he had reason to fear some unscrupulous fellows were hanging around this region and meaning to steal his pets when they got half a chance.  That was why he wanted to watch, and make sure we didn’t belong to the same crowd.”

“Oh! yes, a likely story, too,” continued Bandy-legs, with a sneer.  “Why should anybody want to rob a poor boy who was trying to earn his living by farming, even if it was furs he raised instead of grain or hogs or stock?”