etrieve
your game."

"You'll have to pick your way around there carefully, Steve," Max went
on to caution, as he observed how the pond shore took several twists in
that particular place, making it difficult to reach the spot where the
monster greenback lay extended at full length, a prize worth risking
much for.

"Oh! that's all right, Max; leave it to me. I wouldn't lose that buster,
even if I had to strip, and swim over, with the water as cold as
anything, because this is only Easter time."

With these words the late marksman started to make his way along the
edge of the pond where their hunt was taking place, and which lay not
more than a mile from the town of Carson, in which all of them had their
homes.

While Steve is doing this, and Bandy-legs is making the rifle ready for
further use by inserting a fresh cartridge in place of the empty shell,
a few words of explanation with regard to these four boys may seem
appropriate.

They were boon companions, and together had been having some great times
during the past two years, many of these happenings having been
described at length in the preceding books of this series.

One of their earlier achievements is worthy of mention, because it
supplied the sinews of war, in the shape of money, through the
possession of which they were enabled to carry out many of their plans,
which might otherwise never have materialized through sheer lack of
means to pay expenses.

Knowing that there were plenty of fresh-water clams called mussels in
some of the waters adjacent to Carson, these boys, together with Owen
Hastings, a cousin of Max, now visiting an old aunt abroad, who wanted
to adopt him, had made a secret investigation.

Max had been reading about the wonderful find of pearls in mussels
picked up in the streams in Missouri, Indiana and other places, and he
conceived the idea that possibly those in the smaller tributaries of the
Evergreen River, flowing past the home town, might yield something worth
while.

Accordingly he and his four chums, without saying a word to anybody, had
gone into camp on the Big Sunflower River, and commenced their pearl
hunting operations.

The result made a tremendous flurry around that whole vicinity, for the
wideawake lads found quite a lot of valuable, pearls in the heaps of
mussels which they gathered along the little stream.

Of course once the news leaked out everybody hastened to glean a
fortune in the pearl line; but the boy