“I think you fell in soft,” I said; “it shows how thoughtful I am.  A scout is foresighted—­”

“You make me sick!” Pee-wee shouted.

“Tell Doc Carson to give you some medicine,” I answered.

Laugh!  Because, you see, we were all feeling so good about Artie being saved that we’d laugh at nothing, like a lot of girls.  But girls are all right, I have to admit that.

Let’s see, where was I?  Oh, yes, I was telling you about Artie.  You see when I first arrived with that canoe I tied it just under the cabin window and then scrambled up through the window.  So there it was all the time.  Lucky thing, too.  Only the funny thing was we never missed it—­we were punk scouts, that’s sure.

Then Artie told us how it was.  “After the smoke got so thick that I was dizzy and couldn’t see, I got scared and groped around for Wig.  I couldn’t find him anywhere and he didn’t answer.  I didn’t know whether all of the signal had been sent or not, but anyway I knew I couldn’t stand it in there any longer.  I thought Wig must have climbed out of the window.  So I decided I would do the same thing.  Oh, but didn’t I have some job finding it!  I lay down flat, I knew enough to do that anyway, and then I crawled around with one hand up feeling for the window sill.  When I found it I was so dizzy I just hung to it and I thought I was a goner sure.”

“I know how you felt,” I said, “because I was in the same trouble myself.”

Then he said how he dragged himself up to the window sill and tried to shout, but couldn’t.  Then he fell across it and kind of wriggled out.  He didn’t have his senses, but he knew enough to know that there was a narrow part of the deck, just a passageway sort of, outside, and he thought he’d fall on that.  But it was lucky he didn’t.  He fell past it right into the water and that brought him to his senses, kind of.  So he sputtered and groped around till he happened to clutch the Indian dugout and it rolled over with him and the anchor that we had laid in it with a rope to hold it fast to the houseboat, the anchor rolled out, and the first thing he knew he was drifting up the river, hanging onto the dugout for dear life.

He was feeling so weak and sputtering so on account of his lungs being all filled with smoke, that he couldn’t shout and after a while he drifted up on the bar near Second Bend.  Then he got the dugout set right side up on the mud while he bailed it out by splashing in it with his hands and afterwards making them into a cup.

After that it was easy drifting up stream and when he got to about a quarter of a mile below the boathouse, he managed to paddle over to the shore and then he pulled himself along by holding on to the weeds and things.

“You had a pretty narrow escape,” Pee-wee said.

“It was a narrow boat, why shouldn’t he have a narrow escape,” I said; “I had a good wide escape, anyway.”

“Didn’t you have your hat with you to bail with?” somebody asked Artie.