but one individual in it and he--he was rowing by instinct, as
the birds fly, for his gaze was glued to a newspaper sheet, the sun's
own evening edition, gorgeously printed by the painted rays in every hue
of the spectrum.

He was heading straight--straight for the floating wharf with its
plank-bridge running out ashore.

Jack at a Pinch again!

"Do--do you know who he is?" Pem flashed the question upon the older of
her two boy-knights.

"Well-ll! I guess so." Stud's joy in the recognition floundered a
little. "He--he's the fellow--one of the fellows--who boomed the
aeroplane, the other day, to get you girls quietly out of the cave, when
there was a 'rattler--'"

"As if we'd have made a fuss, anyhow!" The girl's eyes blazed, again a
patchwork, drawing their red center from the sun. "You said--you said
that it was so hard to make friends with him, like whistling jigs to a
milestone--ah!" Her own voice was suddenly stony. "Have you--oh! have
you made any headway since?"

"Humph! Yes. I've found out something about him."

The patrol leader's preoccupied eyes were on the boat edging vaguely
nearer to the wharf, with its one "nickum" figure, so nonchalantly
rowing, so absorbed in the rainbowed sheet upon its knees that at this
moment it awkwardly "caught a crab" and almost suggestively lost an oar.

Simultaneously, however, the phonograph on the piazza struck up, as a
prelude to festivities, the Virginia reel, the notes tripping gaily out
across the painted lake; and the rower shot one glance upward, as if to
say: "I'll be there in time!" then bent his hungry nose to the paper
again.

"What--what did you find out about him?" Pem's interest was equally
hungry--positively famishing. "His name--eh?"

"Ha--that's the question! Over on Greylock the farmers' sons call him
Shooting Star', alias 'Starry'," with a boyish laugh, "because when they
were awf'ly hard up for a player in the last ball game of the series
against Willard College, having lost their second baseman and substitute
too, by gracious! he breezed along, an' the captain, hearing he had
played on a college team, roped him in ... an'--an', what do you know,
but he won the game for that mountain team with a home run! A home run
over the left field fence! Bully!"

"But, surely, _they_ know his--real--name!" Pem's aloof absorption
in that fell like fog-drip even upon the glow from that left field
fence.

"Maybe they do--and maybe they don't! He refused it