Dinner was eaten in quicker time than usual.  Dick and Dave, perhaps some of the others, felt a secret desire to slip over to the other camp, but no one mentioned any such wish.  Instead, the dinner dishes were washed, the cooking utensils cleaned, and the camp put in a very good semblance of order.

“In forty-five minutes more,” remarked Prescott, glancing at his watch, “we must be back at training work.”

“Not to-day,” replied Tom.

“What’s the matter?” demanded Dick, looking sharply at him.

“In forty-five minutes more,” exclaimed Reade, “we’ll be sitting inside the tent, looking out at the weather.”

“What are you talking about, Tom?” asked Darry.

“Read your answer in the skies,” retorted Reade.

Though none of the other five boys had noticed it, the sky had been gradually clouding.  The wind was becoming brisker, too, and there was more than the usual amount of moisture in the air.

“Pshaw!  That’s a shame,” muttered Dick.

“I wish we might arrange it with the weather clerk to have it rain at night, after ten o’clock, and have dry ground in the day time,” sighed Dave Darrin.

Yet none of the boys spoke the thought that was uppermost in more than one mind—–­the wish that they might go over to the Bentley camp to spend the time that it rained in the society of the girls.

It was Reade, who was perhaps less attracted by girls’ society than the others who finally suggested: 

“We ought to send someone over to the other camp to see if they are all fixed to stand the coming rain.”

“Good idea!” nodded Dick.  “You run over, Tom.”

Reade was away less than ten minutes.

“Dr. Bentley says they’ll be as snug as can be in the biggest kind of a summer rain that the weather clerk has on tap,” Tom reported.

Flashes of lightning were now illumining the gradually darkening sky.  Distant rumblings of thunder also sounded.

“I hope it won’t be much of a thunderstorm,” sighed Dick.  “Some girls are very uneasy in a thunderstorm.”

“Laura is afraid of one, I know,” said Dave.

In a few minutes more the big drops of rain began to fall.  Soon after swirling sheets of water descended.  Dick & Co. had all they could do to keep dry in such a downpour.

“This is where the portable house has the advantage of a tent,” grunted Tom.  “The portable houses yonder are even equipped with some kind of rubber roofing.  If this storm keeps up through the night at this rate, we’ll be washed out long before daylight.”

“I can stand it,” retorted Prescott, “as long as I know that Mrs. Bentley and the girls are protected from the weather.  Yet I won’t mind if the storm does let up after an hour or two.”

Conversation ceasing, after a time, all but Reade and Dalzell got out books to read from the slender stock of literature that they had brought with them into the woods.