Pence was unable to hide his chagrin. He flung the ball as far as he could across the field, and sullenly started back for his camp. But he slipped on his sweater as he went. He had remembered Kingdon's advice of the week before.
"He got what he asked for, and didn't like it," Peewee snickered.
"Shows his bringing up!" muttered Cloudman.
"Regular Chesterfield for manners!" chuckled Red Phillips.
Midkiff, too disgusted to speak at all, looked his contempt.
They forgot that it took training of the right kind for a young fellow to get into the habit of controlling his temper. Kingdon might have been intentionally aggravating, for he went off whistling in the other direction, and alone. One could seldom tell whether Rex was perturbed or not. At least, on this particular occasion he showed no apparent feeling for Horace Pence.
None of the others followed Rex at the moment, and he slipped into the woods alone while his mates were picking up the bats and recovering other articles. He did not care to be questioned just then. Nevertheless he was smiling. He was wise enough to appreciate how Horace Pence felt.
Going whistling down the aisles of the wood, but bearing off the usual route to their camp, Kingdon suddenly came upon something that stopped him.
"Hul-_lo!_" he murmured, startled if not surprised. "Who's been chopping down trees?"
The spot was almost directly above their camp. The steep hillside fell away to the small plateau on which the Walcott Hall boys had set up their tent. Below that was the cove, with its pebbly, narrow, crescent beach, and the catboat courtesying to the swell of the water. Kingdon could get a glimpse of her stick through the trees.
Here, just before him, a goodly sapling had been cut off near the ground. That, in itself, was an infringement of the rules laid down by the Manatee Company. Rex had been warned against cutting wood of this kind for any purpose whatsoever on Storm Island.
"Now, who did this?" muttered the lad again. "Surely none of our fellows."
His quick eye saw something in the grass, and he hastened to pick it up. A hatchet, with one side of the blade rusted.
"Our extra hatchet! The one that MacComber fellow borrowed. I'm sure he didn't return it!"