e
warning he gave, as he meant them to be. He didn't want them to go
into the work of guarding Jack as if he were simply a figure in a new
and fascinating game. He wanted them to take the task very seriously,
and give their best efforts to it. And, after such a speech, he had no
doubt that they would carry out his intentions, and that if there were
any way of making Jack safe from future attacks they would find it.

Jack himself suffered no ill effects worth mentioning from his rough
experience, unpleasant as it had been.

"Gee, Jack," said Pete Stubbs, when he saw his chum the morning after
his rescue, "one would think, just to look at you, that you liked
having a chap chloroform you and kick you around a little bit of a
boat. You look great!"

"I had a good night's sleep, Pete. That's why. Look at the time--it's
the middle of the afternoon, isn't it? I felt a lot more tired the day
after that baseball double header than I do right now. They didn't
really hurt me, you see. And that swim in the cold water was just what
I needed to make me feel fine after it, too. That chased the headache
the drug gave me, and set me up in fine shape."

"I tell you why, Jack. It's because you always take a lot of exercise
and look after yourself all the time, that things like that don't upset
you."

"Say, Pete, Tom Binns is coming around here again, later. I feel so
good that I think I'd like to go and do something this afternoon. What
do you say? I think it would be fine to go down to the lake and have a
great old swim. Summer don't last so long that I want to miss any of
the swimming while it's as good as it is now."

"I'll go you!" said Pete, never thinking that it might be just such
expeditions that Dick Crawford was afraid of. "Say, wouldn't it be
fine to live in a place where you can go swimming all the year round,
like Florida, or California, or some place like that?"

"I don't know that it would, Pete. I think all the seasons are good,
in their own time. You wouldn't like never to see the snow, or to be
in a place where it never froze and made ice for skating, would you?"

"Say, Jack, I never thought of that! That's a funny thing about you.
You never go off the way the rest of us do, without thinking about
things. You think of all sides of anything. I wish I was like that.
I wouldn't make so many fool breaks!"

"Old Dan used to catch me up every time I said anything in a hurry,"
explained Jack, wit