"That just shows how little brain power that fellow has," said Joe. "What good would it have done him if he had got the aerial down? It wouldn't have taken us long to put it up again."
"Just for the satisfaction of boasting about it, I suppose," said Herb. "But I guess he won't say much, about this affair. He'll calm down for some time to come, anyway."
"We'd never have heard the last of it from that bunch if they had been able to put something over on us," said Bob. "But never mind that crowd now. Let's get to work on our panel and see if we can't get things hitched up in time for the Saturday evening concert. I'm crazy to get the thing actually finished now."
"No more than I am," said Joe. "Let's go!" His three chums all felt very much at home in Bob's workroom, and knew where to find the various tools almost as well as Bob did himself. Jimmy was given the job of sawing a panel board out of an oak plank, while the others busied themselves with stripping the insulation from lengths of wire and scraping the bared ends to be sure of a good, clean connection. Bob also cleaned and tinned his soldering iron, in preparation for the numerous soldered joints that it would be necessary to make.
"It seems to me you rest an awful lot in between strokes, Doughnuts," said Herbert to that perspiring individual. "Why don't you keep right on sawing until you get through? It seems to me that would be a lot better than the way you're doing it."
"If you don't like the way I'm doing this, just come and do it yourself," was the indignant reply. "I'd like to see you saw through twenty inches of seven-eighths oak without stopping. You always seem to get all the soft jobs, anyhow. Whenever there's anything real hard to do, like this job, for instance, it gets wished on me."
"That's because we know you like hard work," said Bob, laughing.
"Well, I get it whether I like it or not," complained Jimmy. "But it's almost done now, so I'll finish it quickly and prevent any of you fellows having to do some real work."
"Jimmy's certainly good at that, you have to admit it," said Joe. "I could just stand here all day and admire the way he does it."
But for once the fat boy refused to rise to the bait, and kept doggedly on until at last he had a neat twenty inch square cut out of the big plank.