As soon as we got the leopard into Mr. Hasbrook’s barn, we made a hay bed in one of the stalls and laid him there. I felt awful sorry for him now that I knew about his history. And I wished that he had never come near me, but got away into the mountains. Harry Donnelle held the lantern into the stall and he looked so helpless lying there, with his feet tied together and grass and dirt all over him and the fly paper on his face, that I kind of blamed myself. Anyway, I was glad that his people liked him and missed him. Maybe he’d be glad to get back, hey?

Harry said, “Good night, Marshal Foch, and good luck to you. Just have a little patience.”

He was awfully nice, Harry was. That was just the way he talked.

Before we went into the house he said, “Suppose three or four of you kids go back and bring our stuff here and we’ll camp right here on the spot till we get through with this business.” So the Warner twins and Will Dawson went back by the road and the rest of us went in the house with Harry and Mr. Hasbrook.

When we got in the parlor, Harry looked over the paper and found a big ad. This is how it read:

Harry Donnelle said, “I rather like Mr. Costello already; he’s so modest. I bet he’s one of those quiet, retiring little ‘after you, please’ men that blushes when you speak to him. We’ll just drop him a line and one of you kids can hike it over to Saugerties and catch an early train down to Kingston and hand it to him.”

I said, “I’ll go.”

But he said, “No, you’ve had adventures enough and if they ever get you in a circus they’ll keep you there in the congress of freaks.” So it was decided that Dorry Benton would go.

While we were waiting for the fellows to come back with our stuff, Harry wrote the letter and this is what he said. It’s copied word for word out of our hike record:

After a little while the fellows came back with our stuff and we put up our tent between a couple of trees in Mr. Hasbrook’s orchard. He said we could camp in the house if we wanted, but how can anybody camp in a house, I’d like to know? You might as well talk about going swimming in a bath tub. No siree, the orchard for us. Mr. Hasbrook said we could eat all the apples we wanted to, but we didn’t eat many. I ate five—that isn’t very many.

We gathered some sticks and started a camp-fire and I made coffee and flapjacks and scrambled eggs with egg powder. Mr. Hasbrook’s daughter brought us out some pie and um, um, wasn’t it good! Oh boy, it was nice sprawling around there. But anyway, we turned in early—one o’clock in the morning is early. You couldn’t turn in much earlier or it would be the night before. I guess we wouldn’t have turned in then, except that Dorry had to roll out at about six, so as to catch the train down to Kingston.

Harry Donnelle said, “I suppose Mr. Rinaldo Costello will send a mammoth, astounding, bewildering, astonishing, amazing, stupifying, extraordinary, remarkable, dazzling, baffling, cavalcade after Marshal Foch, as soon as he gets our staggering, unbelievable, incredible letter.”

We were all of us just sprawling around the fire and Harry was sitting on a little three legged milking stool and kind of guying Costello’s mammoth show, in that funny way he had, and saying that Mr. Costello would probably say I was a matchless, intrepid, dauntless, fearless hero and adventurer, when all of a sudden that word adventurer put a thought into my head.

I said, “When it comes to being a dauntless, fearless adventurer, I guess nobody has anything on you, that’s one thing sure.”

“Oh, I’ve had a few games of basketball,” he said.

“I bet you’ve been to lots of places,” I told him.

He said, “Well, I’ve attended one or two pink teas and strawberry festivals. Once I was usher at a concert in an Old Ladies’ Home. The wildest time I ever had was umpiring a game of checkers.”

“You didn’t win that Distinguished Service Cross umpiring a game of checkers,” Westy said.

“No, I won that playing hide and seek with Fritzie in No Man’s Land,” he said. “Chuck a little more wood on the fire, Roy.”

I said, “There’s one thing you never told me about, and you promised to tell it, too. It’s an adventure, but it’s a kind of a mystery, too.”

“Well,” he said, “adventures aren’t so much, but I’ll have to make an extra charge for mysteries. The high cost of mysteries is something terrible. I don’t know what the mystery may be, but if you’ll go in the house and get my cigarette case out of the pocket of my coat that’s hanging in the sitting room, I’ll let you have any mystery I happen to have in stock at the wholesale price.”

Oh bibbie, didn’t I scoot in after that cigarette case. He was always smoking cigarettes, that fellow. He told us never to do it, but he was always doing it himself. He said he was too old to reform.

When I came back I said, “It’s about that money of yours—that two hundred dollars that we found in the locker of the house-boat. It made a lot of trouble in Temple Camp, that’s one sure thing. Don’t you remember how you said that you’d tell me all about how you got it, some day?”

He said, “Oh that; that wasn’t an adventure; that was just an episode.”

“I know what episodes are all right,” I told him; “didn’t my father have a couple of them. If there’s a narrow escape, that’s a sign it’s not an episode; it’s an adventure. You can have episodes any day.

“Well, there wasn’t a very narrow escape to that one, anyhow,” he said, laughing all the while; “it was about six feet wide, I guess. But here goes, if you want it. Gather closer around the fire, because this adventure is mighty wet.”

“That’s a sure sign it’s an adventure,” I told him, “because how can an episode get wet?”

“I guess you’re right,” he said; “it might get a little damp, but not really wet. Anyway, do you think you can keep still for about ten minutes?”