“Or death,” put in Dick skeptically.

“Then look at us,” went on Tom, not deigning to notice the interruption, “rolling along smoothly at fifty miles an hour in a car that’s like a palace, with its cushioned seats and electric lights and library and bath and soft beds and rich food and servants to wait upon us.  We’re pampered children of luxury, all right, but I’m willing to bet that those ‘horny-handed sons of toil’ had it on us when it came to the real joy of living.”

“Tom was born too late?” chaffed Bert.  “He doesn’t really belong in the twentieth century.  He ought to have lived in the time of Ivanhoe, or Young Lochinvar, or the Three Musketeers, or Robin Hood.  I can see him bending a bow in Nottingham Forest or breaking a lance in a tournament or storming a fortress by day, and at night twanging a guitar beneath a castle window or writing a sonnet to his lady’s eyebrow.”

“Well, anyhow,” defended Tom, “those fellows of the olden time had good red blood in their veins.”

“Yes,” assented Dick drily, “but it didn’t stay there long.  There were too many sword points ready to let it out.”

And yet, despite their good-natured “joshing” of Tom, they, quite as much as he, were eager for excitement and adventure.  In the fullest sense they were “birds of a feather.”  In earlier and ruder days they would have been soldiers of fortune, cutting their ways through unknown forests, facing without flinching savage beasts and equally savage men, looking ever for new worlds to conquer.  Even in these “piping days of peace” that they so much deplored, they had shown an almost uncanny ability to get into scrapes of various kinds, from which sometimes they had narrowly escaped with a whole skin.  Again and again their courage had been severely tried, and had stood the test.  At home and abroad, on land and sea, they had come face to face with danger and death.  But the fortune that “favors the brave” had not deserted them, even in moments of deadliest peril.  They were accustomed to refer to themselves laughingly as “lucky,” but those who knew them best preferred to call them plucky.  A stout heart and a quick wit had “many a time and oft” extricated them from positions where luck alone would have failed them.

And most of their adventures had been shared in company.  The tie of friendship that bound them together as closely as brothers was of long standing.  Beginning at a summer camp, five years earlier, where chance had thrown them together, it had grown increasingly stronger with every year that passed.  A subtle free masonry had from the start made each recognize the others as kindred spirits.  Since this first meeting their paths had seldom diverged.  Together they had gone to college, where their athletic prowess had put them in the first rank in sports and made them popular among their comrades.  On the baseball diamond they had played their positions in brilliant fashion, and on the football gridiron they had added