“GO FOR BATTEN. I’M RIGHT HERE, AND I’LL LOOK AFTER BILL”

MARK TIDD

HIS ADVENTURES AND STRATEGIES

BY

CLARENCE B. KELLAND

ILLUSTRATED BY

W. W. CLARKE

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

NEW YORK AND LONDON

Books by

CLARENCE BUDINGTON KELLAND

Mark Tidd in Egypt

Mark Tidd in Italy

Mark Tidd

Mark Tidd in the Backwoods

Mark Tidd in Business

Mark Tidd’s Citadel

Mark Tidd, Editor

Mark Tidd, Manufacturer

Catty Atkins, Bandmaster

Catty Atkins

Catty Atkins, Riverman

Catty Atkins, Sailorman

Catty Atkins, Financier

HARPER & BROTHERS

Established 1817

COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY HARPER & BROTHERS

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

ILLUSTRATIONS

[“GO FOR BATTEN. I’M RIGHT HERE, AND I’LL LOOK AFTER BILL”]

[PLUNK AND ME WAS GOOD AND MAD]

[THERE, CROUCHING ON THE BROW, WAS THE FIGURE OF A MAN]

[“FELLERS, THE GUARD’S GOT LOOSE, AND HE’S WAITIN’ FOR US TO COME DOWN”]

[“JUST RUNG TWICE RIGHT UNDER MY NOSE”]

[SAMMY GRUNTED WHEN HE GOT THE FULL WEIGHT OF IT]

[HE LET OUT A YELL AS LOUD AS A LOCOMOTIVE WHISTLE]

[“YOU GIT RIGHT OUT OF HERE! G-G-GIT!”]

MARK TIDD

CHAPTER I

My name is Martin—James Briggs Martin—but almost everybody calls me Tallow, because once when I was younger I saw old Uncle Ike Bond rubbing tallow on his boots to shine them, and then hurried home and fixed mine up with the stub of a candle and went to school. I guess it couldn’t have smelled very good, for everybody seemed to notice it, even teacher, and she asked me what in the world I’d been getting into. After that all the boys called me Tallow, and always will, I guess.

I tell you about me first only because I’m writing this account of what happened. Mark Tidd is really the fellow I’m writing about, and Mark’s father and mother, and the engine Mr. Tidd was inventing out in his barn, and some other folks who will be told about in their places. I helped some; so did Plunk Smalley and Binney Jenks, but Mark Tidd did most of it. Mark Tidd sounds like a short name, doesn’t it? But it isn’t short at all, for it’s merely what’s left of Marcus Aurelius Fortunatus Tidd, which was what he was christened, mostly out of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a big book that Mr. Tidd was so fond of reading that he never read much of anything else except the papers.

Mark Tidd was the last of us four boys to move to Wicksville. I was born there, and so was Plunk Smalley, but Binney Jenks moved over from Sunfield when he was five. Mark he didn’t come to town until a little over a year ago, and Plunk and me saw him get off the train at the depot. I guess the car must have been glad when he did get off, for he looked like he almost filled it up. Yes, sir, when he came out of the door he had to squeeze to get through. He was the fattest boy I ever saw, or ever expect to see, and the funniest-looking. His head was round and ’most as big as a pretty good-sized pumpkin, and his cheeks were so fat they almost covered up his eyes. The rest of him was as round as his face, and Plunk said one of his legs was as big as all six of Plunk’s and Binney’s and mine put together. I guess it was bigger. When Plunk and me saw him we just rolled over and kicked up our legs and hollered.

“I hope he’s goin’ to live in Wicksville,” says Plunk, “’cause we won’t care then if a circus never comes.”

A fat boy like that is a good thing to have in a town, so when things sort of slow down you can always go and have fun with him. At any rate, that was what we thought then. It seemed to us that Marcus Aurelius Fortunatus Tidd was a ready-made joke put right into our hands for us to fool with, but afterward we changed our minds considerable.

Mark’s father and mother got off the train after him, and his father said something to him we couldn’t hear. Mark waddled across the platform to where Uncle Ike Bond’s bus stood waiting, and Plunk and me listened to hear what he would say.

“D-d-do you c-carry p-p-p-passengers in that b-bus?” Yes, sir, he said it just like that!

Well, Plunk he looked at me and I looked at him, and he soaked me in the ribs and I smashed his hat down over his eyes, we were so tickled. If we had been going to plan a funny kid we couldn’t have done half so well. We’d have forgot something sure. But nothing was forgot in Mark Tidd, even to the stutter.

Old Uncle Ike looked down off his seat at Mark, and his eyes popped out like he couldn’t believe what they saw. He waited a minute before he said anything, sort of planning in his mind what he was going to say, I guess. That was a way Uncle Ike had, and then he usually said something queer. This time he says:

“Passengers? What? Me carry passengers? No. I’ve just got this bus backed up here to stiddy the depot platform. The railroad comp’ny pays me to do it.”

Mark Tidd he looked solemn at Uncle Ike, and Uncle Ike looked solemn at him. Then Mark says, respectful and not impertinent:

“If I was to sit here and hold down the p-p-platform could you drive my folks? I could keep it from m-m-movin’ much.”

Uncle Ike blinked. “Son,” says he, “climb aboard, if this here rattletrap looks safe to you, and fetch along your folks. We’ll leave the platform stand without hitchin’ for wunst.”

At that me and Plunk turned to look at the fat boy’s father and mother. Mr. Tidd was a long man, upward of six foot, I guess, and not very wide. His shoulders kind of sloped like his head was too heavy for them, and his head was so big that it was no wonder. His hair was getting gray in front of his ears where it showed under his hat, and he had blue eyes and thin cheeks and a sort of far-off, pleasant expression, like he was thinking of something nice a long ways away. He was leaning against a corner of the station reading out of a big book and paying no attention to anybody. Afterward I found out the book was Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, and that he always carried it around with him to read in a little when he got a spare minute.

Mrs. Tidd wasn’t that kind of person at all. As soon as Plunk and me looked at her we knew she could make bully pies, and wouldn’t get mad if her fat boy was to sneak into the pantry and cut a slice out of one of them in the middle of the afternoon. You could tell she was patient and good-natured, but, all the same, she wasn’t the kind you could fool. If you came home with your hair wet it wouldn’t do any good to tell her somebody threw a pail of water on it. She was looking around to see what she could see, and I bet she didn’t miss much.

The fat boy he motioned to her to come to the bus, and she spoke to her husband. He looked up sort of vague, nodded his head, and came poking across the platform, holding his book in front of him and reading away as though he hadn’t a minute to spare, and clean forgot all about the valise he’d set down beside him.

“Jeffrey,” says Mrs. Tidd, “you’ve forgot your satchel.”

He shut his book, but kept his finger in the place, and looked all around him. Pretty soon he saw the satchel and nodded his head at it. “So I have,” he says, “so I have,” and went back to get it.

Then all of them got into Uncle Ike’s bus, and he stirred up his horses who had been standing ’most asleep, with heads drooping, and they went rattling and banging up the street. When Uncle Ike’s bus got started you could hear it half a mile. I guess it was all loose, for it sounded like a hail-storm beating down on a tin roof.

“Wonder where they’re goin’?” says Plunk.

“You got to do more’n wonder if you’re goin’ to find out,” I says, and started trotting after the bus. It wasn’t hard to keep it in sight, because Uncle Ike’s horses got tired every little while and came to a walk.

They stopped at the old Juniper house that had been standing vacant for six months, ever since old man Juniper went to Chicago to live with his daughter Susy’s oldest girl that had married a man with a hardware store there. The yard was full of boxes and packing-cases and furniture all done up with burlap and rope.

“They’re goin’ to live here,” Plunk yells; and I was as glad as he was. The benefits of having a stuttering fat boy living near you aren’t to be sneezed at by anybody.

We found a shady place across the street and watched to see what would happen. It’s always interesting to watch other folks work, especially if what they’re doing is hard work, and I guess carrying furniture and trunks and boxes is about as hard as anything.

Mrs. Tidd was ready for work before anybody else. She came to the door with a big apron on and a cloth tied around her hair, and the way she sailed into things was a caution. It seemed like she jumped right into the middle of that mess, and in a minute things were flying. Mr. Tidd came next with his book under his arm and stood in the stoop looking sort of puzzled. Mrs. Tidd straightened up, and then sat down on a packing-box.

“Jeffrey Tidd,” she said, not sharp and angry, but kind of patient and rebuking, “go right back into the house and take those clothes off. I knew if I didn’t stay right by you you’d get mixed up somehow. Will you tell me why in the world you changed from your second-best clothes to that Sunday black suit to move furniture?”

Mr. Tidd he looked pretty foolish and felt of his pants as though he couldn’t believe they were his best ones.

“That does beat all,” he said. “It does beat all creation, Libby. I wonder how these clothes come to be on me?”

“If you didn’t have ’em on under your others, which ain’t impossible, you must have changed into ’em.”

“My best suit!” he said to himself, shaking his head like you’ve seen the elephant do at the circus, first to one side and then to the other. “My best clothes!”

“Maybe I’d better come along and see you get into the right ones this time,” Mrs. Tidd suggested.

“I guess you don’t need to, Libby. I’ll take these off and hang ’em in the closet, and I’ll hang my second-best ones up, too. Then I’ll put on what’s left. That way I can’t go wrong.” He went off into the house, and Mrs. Tidd flew at the piles of stuff again.

Pretty soon the fat boy came around the side of the house with a quarter of a cherry pie in his hand and the juice dripping down faster than he could suck it off.

“Marcus,” his mother called, “take holt of this bundle of bed-slats and carry ’em up to the front room.”

Mark he grabbed them with one hand and hunched them up under his arm so that one end dragged on the ground, walking off slow and eating pie as he went. It took him quite a while to get back. I could see him look across the street at Plunk and me as he came down the steps. He stopped a minute, sort of thinking.

After a while Mr. Tidd came back again.

“Put the Decline and Fall down somewheres so you can use both hands, Jeffrey,” his wife says. And he did it as meek and obedient as could be. Between them they carried a hair-cloth sofa in after she had told Mark to fetch along some medium-sized boxes.

Mark stooped over one, and we could hear him grunt.

“Hello, Skinny,” Plunk yells. “Git your back into it and h’ist. That’s the way to lift.”

The fat boy straightened up and looked at us quite a while. Then he sat down on the box and called, “I bet the two of you can’t l-l-lift it.”

“I’ll bet,” says Plunk, “we kin lift it. I’ll bet we kin carry it from here to the standpipe and back without lettin’ her down wunst.”

“Braggin’ don’t carry no b-boxes.”

The way he said it sort of made me mad. “Come on, Plunk,” I says; “lets show this here hippopotamus whether we kin carry it or not.” And we went running across the street.

“Where d’you want it put?” I says.

“No use you tryin’. You couldn’t g-git it up.”

“Git holt,” I says to Plunk. “Now, Mister What’s-your-name, where’s it go?”

“Up-stairs in the hall; but you b-b-better not try. It’s too heavy for you.”

Plunk and me took that box up-stairs a-flying and ran down again.

“There,” I says. “Now kin we carry it?”

He stuck up what there was to his nose. “One ain’t nothin’. I carried the hull twelve out when we was movin’ in fifteen mum-minutes.”

“If you did,” I says, “Plunk and me can carry ’em in in twelve.”

He just laughed.

“Doggone it,” I says, “we’ll show you, you’re so smart.”

“Can’t d-d-do it.”

“You ain’t the only kid that can carry things,” Plunk says, with a scowl.

Mark he pulled out a little silver watch and held it in his hand. “Twelve m-minutes, was it? Can’t do it. I’ll keep time.”

Well, Plunk and me went at those boxes like sixty, and the way we ran them up-stairs was a terror to cats. When the last one was up we were panting and sweating and most tuckered out. Mark looked off his watch when we came out with a sort of surprised expression. “You kids is stronger than I figgered. You did it in eleven minutes and a half.”

“Sure,” I says.

“But them boxes wasn’t very heavy. You can’t carry that big box, by j-jimminy!”

Plunk and me was good and mad, and if anybody’d seen the way we hustled that big box in they wouldn’t have believed their eyes.

“That’s perty good,” says Mark. “Wouldn’t thought it of you kids. Must be stronger here in Wicksville than over to Peckstown where I come from.” He stopped a minute. “I can’t lift that big rockin’-c-c-chair myself.”

“Huh!” snorted Plunk. “That’s a easy one.” And in we wrastled with the chair.

We weren’t going to have any strange kid think we weren’t up to all he was, so we stayed right there all the afternoon, and I guess we proved pretty conclusively we could carry. And that wasn’t all: we proved we could last. I bet we carried two-thirds of the Tidds’ furniture in. When it was all done we sat down on the fence to pant and rest. Mark’s mother called him.

“I got to go to s-s-s-supper,” he says. “Come again when you feel s-s-strong.” And then he went into the house.

Plunk and me sat still quite a while. I began to think about it and think about it, and I could see Plunk was thinking, too. In about fifteen minutes I looked over at him and he looked over at me.

PLUNK AND ME WAS GOOD AND MAD

“How many things did that fat kid carry in?” I says.

“I didn’t see him carry anythin’.”

“Neither did I.”

We thought quite a spell more. Then I said to Plunk, “I guess maybe we better not do too much braggin’ about how much an’ how long we kin carry.”

He grinned kind of sickly. “This here Mark Tidd,” he says, “ain’t nobody’s fool—leastways, not on Mondays, which is to-day.”

When we got better acquainted with Mark Tidd he read a book called Tom Sawyer to us. I guess he got his idea of making us work out of that; he was always taking schemes out of books.

CHAPTER II

Mrs. Tidd was just the kind of person I thought she would be. She cooked lots of things and cooked them good; and, no matter how often Mark wanted to eat, she never said a word. Plunk and Binney Jenks and me got to going there a lot, and there was always cookies and pie and things. Of course, we didn’t go specially to eat, but knowing we’d get something wasn’t any drawback. I liked Mrs. Tidd, and sort of admired her, too. She was always working at something and managing things and keeping track of Mr. Tidd and Mark. I never heard her complain, and I don’t remember ever seeing her sit down except in the cool of the evening after supper.

I don’t want you to get the idea that Mr. Tidd was lazy or shiftless, because he wasn’t. He was just queer, and his memory was as long as a piece of string, which is the way we have in Wicksville of saying there was no knowing just how long it really was. Lots of times I’ve seen Mr. Tidd start out to do a job of work and forget all about it before he got a chance to commence. He was sure to forget if Mrs. Tidd didn’t take the Decline and Fall away from him before he went out of the door. Even that didn’t make it certain, because something to think about might pop into his head all of a sudden, and if it did he had to sit down and think about it then and there. He was a machinist complicated by inventions. Every time he saw you doing anything he’d stop right there and invent a better way for you to do it; and mostly the new ways he invented wouldn’t work.

It was an invention that had brought all the Tidds to Wicksville. Mark told us about it. It seems like Mr. Tidd had been inventing a new kind of machine or engine or something that he called a turbine. He’d been working on it a long time, making pictures of it and figuring it out in his head, but he never had a chance to get right down to business and actually invent it till a little while before they came to our town. Then an aunt of his up and died and left him some money. He quit his job right off and came to Wicksville, where it was quiet and cheap, to finish up doing the inventing. When he got it done he wouldn’t need a job any more because it would make him rich. We used to go out in the barn, where he was tinkering away, and watch him for hours at a time, and he never paid any more attention to us than as if we weren’t there at all. But he was careful about other folks and wouldn’t let them step a foot inside of the door. He was afraid somebody would see what he was up to and go do it first, which would have been a mean trick.

Mr. Tidd wasn’t what you call suspicious; he wasn’t always expecting somebody that he knew to do something to his engine, and I guess any man that had wanted to could have got into the workshop and looked it all over to his heart’s content by talking to Mr. Tidd for an hour or so and listening to him tell about the Roman Empire, and how it split down the middle and went all to smash. He was the kind-heartedest man in the world, I guess, and never could see any bad in any one—not in any one he really saw. He had a sort of far-away idea that there was bad folks, and that some of them might want to steal his invention, but if he had seen a man crawling through a window of the barn he’d have found some excuse for him. Anybody could fool him—that is, they could have if Mrs. Tidd hadn’t been there; but she kept her eye on him pretty close and saw to it he didn’t let any strangers come fooling around. If everybody had been as careful as she was this story wouldn’t have happened.

The real beginning of things didn’t look like anything important at all. It happened one afternoon when Mark Tidd and Plunk and Binney and me were hanging around the depot platform waiting for the train to come in. We didn’t expect anybody we knew to come, and there wasn’t any reason for our being there except that there wasn’t any reason for our being anywhere else. Plunk and I sat on one of those baggage-trucks that run along straight for a while and then turn up a hill at the end; Binney sat on a trunk; and Mark was on the platform, because that was the safest place for him and wouldn’t break down. It was hot and sleepy, and we wished we were somewheres else or that something exciting would happen. It didn’t, so we just sat there and talked, and finally we got to talking about Mr. Tidd’s engine. We’d seen him tinkering around it, and he’d told us about it, so we were interested.

“Wouldn’t it be great,” says Binney, “if it worked when he got it done! Us fellers could say all the rest of our lives that we knew intimate a inventor that was as big as Edison.”

We never had thought about that part of it before; but what Binney said was so, and we got more anxious than ever for things to turn out right.

“If it does,” says Plunk, “Mark’ll be rich, and maybe live to the hotel. Think of bein’ able to spend a dollar ’n’ a half every day for nothin’ but meals and a place to sleep.”

Mark he didn’t say anything, because he was drowsy and his head was nodding.

“Mr. Tidd says it’ll reverlutionize the world,” Binney put in. “He says if them Romans had had one of his gas-turbines the empire never’d have fell.”

“If it goes, nothin’ else’ll be used to run automobiles. If Mr. Tidd sold a engine for ev’ry automobile in the United States I guess he could afford livin’ to the hotel. I’ll bet he could own a automobile himself.”

“And they’ll use ’em in fact’ries and steamboats, ’cause they kin be run with steam same as with gasolene.”

“And won’t be more’n a twentieth as big as engines is now.”

We kept on talking and describing what we thought Mr. Tidd’s turbine would do and guessing how long it would be before he was ready to try it to see if it went. We was so interested we never noticed a man sitting a little ways off on a trunk. Pretty soon we did notice him, though, for he got up deliberate like and stretched himself and looked around as if he didn’t see anything, including us. Then his eyes lit on Mark, and he kind of grinned. He lighted a cigar and came walking over toward us.

“How about this train?” he asks, like he wasn’t much interested but wanted to talk to pass away the time. “Is it generally much behind?”

“Not much,” I says. “I ain’t known it to be over a hour late for two weeks.”

“Live here?” he asks, with another grin.

I nodded, but didn’t say anything out loud.

“Pretty quiet place for boys, isn’t it?”

“It ain’t what most folks’d call excitin’.”

After a minute he says: “I used to live in a little town like this when I was a boy, and I remember there wasn’t very much to do. I used to hang around the carpenter shop watching the carpenters work, and around the machine shop seeing how the machinists did things. It was pretty interesting. I suppose you do the same here.”

“We-ell, it ain’t exactly a machine shop we hang around.”

“Oh,” he says, “what is it?”

“It’s a—a—”

Just then Mark seemed to wake up sudden He grunted and interrupted what I was going to say, and then did the saying himself. “It’s a b-barn,” he says.

“Oh,” says the man, “a barn? What do you watch in the barn? The horses?”

“No. Ain’t no h-h-horses.” Then he half shut his eyes like he was going to take another nap.

The man didn’t say anything for a spell. “I was always interested in machines when I was a boy,” he says, at last. “Any kind of a machine or engine got me all excited. But we didn’t have as fine machines then as you do now. They’re making improvements and inventing new things every day. Some day they’re going to invent something to make locomotives better—something along the turbine line, I expect. Know what a turbine is?”

I was just going to say yes, when Mark woke up again. “Yes,” he says, “a t-t-turbine is a climbin’ vine that grows over p-porches.”

The man kind of strangled and looked away. “No,” he says in a minute, “I guess you got it mixed up with woodbine.”

“Maybe so,” says Mark.

We heard the engine whistle, and the man hurried off to see about his baggage. The train pulled in and pulled out again and left us sitting on the platform wondering what to do next. Mark stood up slow and tired and yawned till it seemed like his head would come off.

“Fellers,” says he, “you gabble like a lot of geese. Looked like that man was more’n ord’nary interested in engines.”

“’Spose he heard what we was talking about?”

Mark looked at me disgusted. “Tallow,” says he, “don’t go layin’ down in no pastures, ’cause a muley cow ’thout horns’ll come and chaw a hunk out of your p-p-pants.”

“I guess I ain’t so green,” I told him, but he only grinned.

“Let’s go swimmin’,” says Binney.

Mark shook his head and looked solemn. “Go ahead if you want to. No swimmin’ for me; it’s Friday, and I stepped on a spider this mornin’.”

Plunk busted out laughing. “Haw,” he says, “believin’ in signs. I ain’t superstitious.”

Mark looked at him and blinked. “I ain’t superstitious, but I don’t b’lieve in takin’ extra chances. Probably there ain’t nothin’ in it, but you can’t never tell.”

That illustrates better than I can tell what kind of a fellow Mark Tidd was—cautious, looking on all sides of a thing he was thinking of doing, always trying to figure plans out ahead so nothing disagreeable could happen. I don’t want you to think he was a coward, because he wasn’t, but he never ran his head into trouble that could be dodged ahead of time.

We all started for the river, because it would be cooler there even if we didn’t go in, but on the way Mark found a four-leaf clover, and a white cat ran across the road in front of us, so he figured it out that if there was any bad luck about Friday and killing a spider those two good-luck signs had knocked the spots off it.

CHAPTER III

Mark Tidd wasn’t given much to exercise, but that isn’t saying he couldn’t stir around spry if there was some good reason. He never wanted to play baseball or tag or anything where you had to run, and usually when a game was going on he’d be lying under a tree reading a book. He said it was a lot easier reading about a game than playing it, and more interesting than watching the kind we played. He read a good deal, anyhow, mostly, I guess, because you can sit so still to do it, and rest at the same time if you want to; and it was surprising the things he got to know about that were useful to us. Seemed like almost everything we wanted to do Mark would have read about some better way of doing it, and that’s how we came to get up the K. K. K., which stands for Ku Klux Klan.

We were all sitting in Tidd’s yard where the shade of the barn fell, and nobody had said anything for quite a spell. I was beginning to want to do something, and it was easy to see that Plunk and Binney were wriggling around uneasy like; but Mark he lay with his little eyes shut tight, looking as peaceful and satisfied as a turtle on a log. All of a sudden the idea popped into my head, and I yelled right out, “Let’s git up a secret society.”

Mark opened one eye and sort of blinked at me, and Plunk and Binney sat up straight.

“What’ll we call it?” Binney wanted to know.

“Who’ll be officers?” Plunk asked.

“I dunno,” I says, sharp like, because they seemed to think I ought to have the whole thing planned out for them to do without their lifting a hand.

Mark rubbed his eyes and rolled over on his side. “What’s the main thing about a s-secret society?” he asks.

“Payin’ dues,” I says, quick.

“Havin’ somethin’ to eat,” Binney guessed.

“Naw,” Mark grunts, contemptuous. “The main thing about a secret society is the s-s-secret.”

We could see in a minute that he was right about that.

“So,” he went on, “if we’re goin’ to have a secret society the first thing is to git a s-s-secret to have.”

“I don’t know no secret,” Binney said, shaking his head hard.

“Nor me,” said Plunk.

I thought a minute, because I knew a couple of secrets, but they were secrets I didn’t calculate to tell anybody, least of all Mark and Plunk and Binney; so I just shook my head, too.

“We’ll make a secret,” Mark told us.

“How?” I wanted to know, because I didn’t see how you could go to work to make a secret, but I might have known Mark would find a way.

“Did you ever hear of the K-k-k-ku K-k-k-klux K-k-k-klan?”

“What?” I asked.

He said it over again.

“I didn’t git it that time,” I told him. “Sounds like a tongue-tied hen tryin’ to cackle.”

Mark sort of scowled at me and did it all over, but not one of us could make a thing of it.

“Write it,” I said; “that’s the only way we’ll ever git it.”

At first he wasn’t going to do it, but we argued with him that it wasn’t any use spoiling a good thing like a secret society just because he couldn’t mention plain a name he wanted to tell us; so at last he wrote it down on a piece of paper. What he wrote was Ku Klux Klan.

“It don’t make no sense,” Binney said. “What language is it, anyhow? Dutch?”

“It ain’t no language. It’s a name.”

“Oh.”

“Of the most p-p-powerful secret society that ever was.”

“I reckon it was over in Russia or somewheres. It sounds like it.”

“It was right here in the United States.”

“Hum,” I said, because that name didn’t sound a bit like the United States to me.

“It was after the war.”

“The Spanish War?”

“No. The North and South war.”

“Oh.... That one. What was it for?”

“For protection. They went ridin’ around at night rightin’ wrongs and scarin’ folks and runnin’ things in general. They wore white sheets over their heads.”

“Gee. Honest?”

“It’s in the histories.”

“And it was secret?”

“The most secret thing ever was. Even men in it didn’t know who one another was.”

“Let’s have one,” Plunk yelled, squirming around like he was sitting on an ant’s nest. “I kin git a sheet.”

“Who’s goin’ to b’long?” I said; and then we all looked at one another.

“Nobody but us four,” Binney whispers, because he’s beginning to feel secret already. There wasn’t any argument to that, so we agreed to be a Ku Klux Klan, and to have our secret meeting-place in a little cave up across from the island where the swimming-hole was. It wasn’t much of a cave. Just a little round room dug out of the hill by somebody a long time ago. I couldn’t stand up straight in it, and when we four was all inside there wasn’t much room left—not with Mark Tidd taking up the space he did.

Well, each of us got a sheet and hid it there, and we kept potatoes to bake and an old frying-pan and a kettle and other things like that in case of emergency, for there was no knowing what might come up with an organization like ours, and we knew we had to be ready. Mark made up passwords and grips and secret signs; and we had an alphabet all of our own that we could write letters to one another in, which was fine, even though there never seemed to be anything very secret to write. But there come to be later on, and there was a time when we was glad of the cave and the potatoes and the frying-pan. But that wasn’t until the next spring, and lots of things happened before then.

I guess maybe it was a month after we organized the Klan when the stranger came to town. We were cooking dinner up at the cave that day—a black bass, four perch, and a couple of blue-gills, with baked potatoes—and we were just scouring the dishes with sand when we looked down and saw Uncle Ike Bond come ambling along the river. Uncle Ike drove the bus when it was necessary and fished the rest of the time, which was most of the time; and he caught fish, too; lots of them. I guess he got a good many on night lines.

Binney Jenks yelled down at Uncle Ike, and he looked up to see who it was. When he recognized Mark Tidd he sat down sort of tired on a log and motioned for us to come. He was a great friend of Mark’s since the day the Tidds moved to town; and he let on to folks that Mark was the smartest boy in Wicksville, which I wouldn’t be surprised if he was.

We all went down the hill, three of us running, and Mark panting along behind and puffing and snorting.

“Expectin’ any visitors?” Uncle Ike asked of Mark.

“No,” said Mark, and sat down.

“Um!” grunted Uncle Ike.

He pulled out his pipe and fussed at it with his jack-knife before he filled it and lighted up. “Looks kinder like you was goin’ to have some,” he said.

Mark didn’t answer anything or ask questions, because if you do Uncle Ike is apt to shut up like a clam and not tell you another thing. He waited, knowing Ike’d tell on if there was anything to say. The old man puffed away for a spell and then asked:

“Father’s makin’ some sort of a whirligig, ain’t he?”

“Yes. He’s inventin’ a e-e-engine.”

“Um!” grunted Uncle Ike. “Calc’late it’s wuth anythin’?”

Mark nodded yes.

“Feller come in on the mornin’ train that seemed tolerable int’rested in sich whirligigs,” said Uncle Ike. “He allowed to set onto the seat with me and asked was I acquainted in town—me! Asked was I acquainted in town!” It was hard for me to tell whether this made Uncle Ike mad or tickled him. He was that way, and you never could make him out. Sometimes when he was maddest he looked most tickled, and when he was most tickled he looked maddest.

“I allowed as how I knowed a few of the citizens by sight and more’n a dozen to speak to,” Uncle Ike went on, “and then he up and begun wantin’ to know. When folks gits to the wantin’-to-know stage on short acquaintance I git to the don’t-want-to-tell stage, and Mister Man didn’t collect no amazin’ store of knowledge, not while he was a-ridin’ on my bus.”

He stopped talking and looked at Mark, and Mark looked at him. Then Uncle Ike winked at Mark. “If I was a smart boy,” he said, “and a stranger feller come to town snoopin’ around and askin’ questions about whirligigs, I’d sorter look into it, I would. And if that stranger feller was askin’ about the i-dentical kind of a whirligig my father was makin’ in the barn and calc’latin’ to git rich out of I’d look into it perty close. And if my father was one of these here inventor fellers that forgits their own names and would trust a cow to walk through a cornfield I’d be perty sharp and plannin’ and keep my eye peeled. That’s what I’d do, and I ain’t drove a bus these twenty years for nothin’, neither. The place to git eddicated,” he said, “is on top of a bus. There ain’t nothin’ like it. There’s where you see folks goin’ away and comin’ home, and there’s where you see strangers and actors and travelin’-men, and everybody that walks the face of the earth. Colleges is all right, maybe, for readin’ and writin’, but when it comes to knowin’ who you kin depend on and who you got to look out for the bus is the place.”

“Did he ask about f-f-father?” Mark wanted to know.

“He didn’t mention him by name,” said Uncle Ike, grinning. “But he says to me, says he, ‘This is a nice town,’ says he, ‘and a town that looks as if there was smart folks in it. It’s lettle towns like this,’ he says, ‘that inventors and other great men comes from,’ says he. ‘Have you got any inventors here?’ he asks.

“‘There’s Pete Biggs,’ I says. ‘He’s up and invented a way to live without workin’.’

“‘Is that all?’ he asks, kind of disappointed.

“‘Wa-al,’ I says, like I was tryin’ hard to remember, ‘I did hear that Slim Peters invented some kind of a new front gate that would keep itself shut. But ’twan’t no go,’ I says, ‘’cause Slim he had to chop down the gate with a ax,’ I says, ‘the first time he wanted to go through it. It was a fine gate to stay shut,’ I says, ‘but it wa’n’t no good at all to come open.’

“‘Ain’t there anybody here tryin’ to make an engine?’ he put in.

“‘Engine?’ says I. ‘Engines is already invented, ain’t they? What’s the use inventin’ when some other feller’s done it first?’

“‘I mean a new kind of an engine,’ he says, ‘a kind they call a turbine?’

“‘Oh,’ says I. ‘I ain’t met up with no engines like that, not in Wicksville. We ain’t much on fancy names here, and I guess if a Wicksville feller had invented anythin’ he wouldn’t have named it that—he’d ’a’ called it a engine right out.’

“‘Umph!’ says the feller, like he was mad, and then got out at the hotel. I stopped long enough to see him talkin’ with Bert Sawyer, so it’s likely he knowed all Bert did inside of ten minutes. And that’s all there was to it.” He looked at Mark with his eyes twinkling.

Mark got up kind of slow, blinking his eyes and looking back at Uncle Ike.

“I guess I’ll go home,” he said.

Uncle Ike slapped his knee and laughed a rattling kind of laugh way down in his throat. “There,” he whispered, like he was talking confidential to Binney and Plunk and me, “what’d I tell you? Hey? What’d I tell you? Don’t take him long to make up his mind, eh? Quicker’n a flash; slicker’n greased lightnin’!”

We went off up the hill after Mark, leaving Uncle Ike sitting on the log laughing to himself and slapping his leg every minute or so. He sat there till we were out of sight.

CHAPTER IV

Mark was pretty quiet walking along, thinking hard what to do, or whether he had better do anything; but finally he seemed to make up his mind and hurried off faster than I ever saw him walk before. And it was a warm day, too. We turned into his yard, and as we went through the gate he jerked his thumb toward the back yard.

“You w-w-wait there,” he stuttered. “I may want you.” Then he went in the front door.

As we walked by we looked through the window and saw the stranger sitting in the parlor talking to Mr. Tidd, and he was nodding and smiling and being very polite; or, anyhow, it seemed that way to me. I always was sort of curious, so I stopped close to the window and listened, while Plunk and Binney went on around the house. I guess it isn’t very nice to listen that way, but I never thought of that until it was all over.

Mr. Tidd was talking.

“Yes, sir,” he was saying, “the world don’t hold another book like this. The title says it’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but it’s about more than that. Why, it’s about everything. It don’t matter what happens, you can find the answer to it in Gibbon.... Yes, sir, The Decline and Fall is the greatest book of ’em all.”

“I agree with you entirely, Mr. Tidd, entirely. It has been some time since I read the book, sir, but I have been promising myself that pleasure—and profit—for several months. I shall read it again, sir, as soon as I get home.”

“You will never regret it,” said Mr. Tidd, and patted the book in his lap.

Somehow the stranger’s face seemed familiar to me, but for a while I couldn’t place him. Then all of a sudden it came to me: he was the man we saw on the depot platform who asked about turbines. I almost yelled out loud to Mark.

I listened again and heard the stranger say:

“I’m in the engineering business, Mr. Tidd, and that’s why I came to see you. I heard you were working on some sort of a machine, and, as my company always wants to keep in touch with the latest developments of mechanics and engineering, I dropped in to have a chat with you.”

“Yes, yes,” said Mr. Tidd; but it was plain he was thinking about something else.

“It happens often,” said the stranger, “that men like yourself, who have valuable ideas, lack the money to carry them out. Very frequently my company, if the idea seems all right, advances the money to carry on experiments.”

“Money,” said Mr. Tidd, vaguely. “Oh yes, money. I don’t need money. No. I have all the money I need.”

The stranger looked disappointed, but he didn’t say anything about it.

“You’re fortunate,” he told Mr. Tidd, “but maybe there’s something else I could do for you.”

“Not as I know of. Don’t seem like I needed a thing, but I’m much obliged, much obliged.”

“What is the nature of the work you are doing?” asked the man. I didn’t think he liked to come right out with the question that way, but probably he couldn’t invent any other way to get at it.

“It’s a turbine,” said Mr. Tidd, right off, and his eyes began to shine. “It’s a practical turbine for locomotives and automobiles and power-plants and what not. Why, sir, this engine of mine will stand on a base no bigger than a cook-stove and develop two hundred horse-power; and it will be reversible. I have a new principle, sir, for the application of steam; a new principle, it is—” He stopped suddenly, shook his head, and said, with a patient sort of smile, “My folks don’t like to have me talk too much about it.”

“Of course,” agreed the stranger, who had been leaning forward and edging farther toward the front of his chair, with interest. “Of course. It is never wise to discuss such things too freely. How far has your work progressed?”

“Not far, not far. In the experimental stages. I have something to show for my work—nothing to boast of, but enough. Enough to make me sure.”

“I should be very interested to look over your workshop,” suggested the stranger. “I always like to see how a thorough machinist has things arranged.”

At that I ducked and ran around the house, and just a moment later Mark came tiptoeing out of the kitchen door. He held up his finger for us to be still and then motioned for us to follow him to the barn.

In the barn he grabbed up a lot of drawings and stuffed them into my hands.

“Here. Take these and hide back of the f-f-fence.”

Then he gave Binney and Plunk some funny-looking pieces of steel to carry, and snatched some other things himself, and we all sneaked out through the back gate and crouched down behind the fence out of sight.

“Father’s goin’ to s-show him the shop,” whispered Mark. “I guess the feller was fixin’ to git a squint at these things. If he was it’s all right, and if he wasn’t no harm’s done.”

In about two shakes of a lamb’s tail Mr. Tidd and the stranger came out of the shop and went inside. We had our ears to the wall and could hear how Mr. Tidd was being taffied by the man, and we could tell by the way he answered back that he was getting to like the stranger more and more every minute. Butter wouldn’t melt in that man’s mouth. He was as full of compliments as an old grist-mill is of rats.

After a while we heard Mr. Tidd say:

“I dunno’s there’d be any objection to your lookin’ at my drawin’s and patterns and stuff. ’Twon’t do no harm, I calc’late.”

The man didn’t say anything, and pretended he wasn’t paying attention. We could hear Mr. Tidd moving around, and then he stopped still, and I knew he was scratching his head, though I couldn’t see him, because he always scratches his head when he can’t figure out just what’s going on.

“I swan,” he said, kind of vague and wondering, “I’d ’a’ bet I left them things right here; I’d ’a’ bet a cookie. But they ain’t here—not a sign of ’em. Now, ain’t that the beatenist? I must ’a’ carted ’em off some place without thinkin’. Um! Hum!... Where’n tunket could it ’a’ been?”

“What seems to be the matter?” asked the stranger, and his voice sounded anxious to me. It did to Mark, too, because he nudged me.

“I’ve up and mislaid my drawin’s and things,” said Mr. Tidd, sounding like he was apologizing. “Ain’t that the dumbest thing! I’m always a-layin’ things around and forgettin’ ’em.”

“Surely they must be in the shop some place,” suggested the stranger.

Again we could hear Mr. Tidd rummaging around, but it wasn’t any use. “No,” he said, “no, they ain’t here. I wonder if I could ’a’ left ’em down to the grocery.”

“What would you be doing with them at the grocery?”

“Nothin’ that I know of, but I might have tucked ’em under my arm and gone just the same. Like’s not I did. Wa-all, I’m sorry I can’t show ’em to you, but maybe they’ll turn up to-morrow.”

“I’ve got to leave on the late train,” said the stranger.

“Too bad,” said Mr. Tidd, his mind still wondering where his things were. “Too bad.” And with that he forgot all about the stranger and went out of the barn and off up the street talking to himself and scratching his head. The stranger looked after him and bit his lips; then he grinned like the joke was on him, and he went, too.

“Well,” I asked Mark, “what now?”

“We’ll put ’em right back,” he said, grinning, “and dad won’t know but what he just overlooked ’em.”

We fixed everything like it was, and then we went down-town to see what we could find out about the stranger.

He was in the hotel when we got there, and it was easy to get out of Bert Sawyer all he knew about him. His name was Henry C. Batten, and he lived in Pittsburg. He was a traveling man for the International Engineering Company, Bert thought, and later we found out it was so, because he left one of his cards in his room and Bert found it.

We sat on the hotel steps until Uncle Ike Bond’s bus rattled up to carry folks to the late train. The stranger squeezed through the door and sat down in a corner, looking as if he wasn’t pleased with things in general. Uncle Ike winked at Mark.

“How’d you make out?” he whispered.

Mark went up close and told him all about it, and Uncle Ike like to have fallen off the seat laughing.

“What’d I tell you?” he chuckled to nobody in particular. “Ain’t he a slick one? Ain’t he? Slicker’n greased pole I call him, eh?”

Then he gathered up the lines, but stooped over again to whisper, “If ever this thing gits where you need help from Uncle Ike Bond just up and say so in his hearin’, and we’ll see what a eddication got on top of a bus is good for.”

I didn’t see what good he could ever do anybody, but that just shows how you can be mistaken in folks.

CHAPTER V

Right up till snow was on the ground the Ku Klux Klan used to meet in the cave. We would go up there Saturday mornings, all coming by different roads, and when we met there would be passwords and signals and grips and all sorts of secret things. After a while we got so many signs that a fellow had to be pretty careful what he was up to so as not to be telling the other members he was in deadly peril, or that a secret meeting was called at once, or something else, because almost everything we did had a meaning. For instance, if I was to reach around and scratch my back when Mark or Plunk or Binney were looking, that meant that I had to speak to them right away about something important; and if one of us shoved both hands in his pockets at once that meant to look out because enemies were watching. All our signals were simple things like that that wouldn’t be noticed. Mark got most of them up, and I guess there were more than a hundred things to be remembered.

We used to sit in the cave and wish there were some real wrongs being done that we could right, or that we had some kind of a powerful enemy, or that there was a mean, miserable whelp that we could visit at night with our white sheets on and tie him to a tree and frighten him into being a good citizen; but there weren’t any, and we had to take it out in making believe. But that was almost as much fun.

We had one sign that was never to be used except when we were desperate and needed help and succor, and that was to untie your necktie and tie it up again. But the best one of all was the jack-knife sign, and it was a dandy, because there were so many ways of using it. If one of us met the other and said “Lemme take your jack-knife,” that was one way; or if you sent a note by somebody else with the word jack-knife in it, or anything like that. But the best way was the one to be used if you were a captive, or if enemies were surrounding the cave and you wanted to have your comrades rally around you. Nobody would ever suspect it. All you had to do was to meet somebody, a farmer or a man fishing or any one, and give him your knife and tell him please to give it to any one of the society. As soon as that one got the knife he had to collect the others and make for the cave as fast as he could. It worked bully. Lots of times I’ve sent my little brother over to Mark’s with my knife, and dozens of times Mark or Binney or Plunk have sent their knives to me. Once Binney sent his by his father, who was going past my house. I don’t believe the real, original Ku-Kluxers had a better sign than that.

The cave was up on the side hill like I told you, and looked down on the river. I told you, too, how Uncle Ike Bond was always fishing when he could get time, which was most always, and he used to come past almost every time we were there. After a while it got so he’d stop to talk to us or we’d go down to talk to him. Finally one day he grinned, knowing-like, and asked what we were doing there so much.

We looked at one another, and then Mark reached around and scratched his back. That meant, of course, that he had to speak about something important right away, so we got up and told Uncle Ike we’d be back in a minute. He grinned and nodded.

We went off out of earshot, and Mark Tidd whispered:

“Uncle Ike’s a pretty good f-f-friend, ain’t he?”

We said yes, he was.

“I think he’s catchin’ on that we’re up to somethin’.”

“Maybe so,” I said.

“Let’s make him a m-member. Then he can’t give us away. Besides, he’d be a pretty valuable one, anyhow.”

We talked it over awhile, and it was decided unanimous to make him a Ku-Kluxer, so we went back to where he was sitting.

“Uncle Ike,” says Mark, “can you keep a secret?”

“Wa-all, I hain’t never been tempted very hard, but I guess I can keep one good enough for ordinary purposes.”

“This is the secretest thing that ever was,” says Binney.

“Um!” says Uncle Ike. “You don’t tell!”

“We’re the Ku Klux Klan,” says Plunk, to save Mark the trouble of stuttering so many k’s.

“And we want you to join if you’ll take the oath.”

“Sure,” says Uncle Ike. “I’ve always hankered to b’long to somethin’ secret, but I hain’t never seemed to git around to it.”

Mark recited the oath, and Uncle Ike swore to it solemn as could be. He seemed real glad to be a member. After that we spent most of the afternoon teaching him our secret signs and tokens and things. He said he didn’t think he could learn all of them, but that a few dozen of the most important would do. He seemed particular delighted with the jack-knife sign.

“But looky here,” he said, shaking his finger in our faces, “don’t go workin’ any of them signs on me unless you mean ’em in earnest. You young fellers kin fool with ’em as much as you want to, but don’t go sendin’ me no jack-knives till you git where you need my help and need it bad. I’m too old to go gallivantin’ around chasin’ wild geese.”

After that he stopped to our meetings more often than ever, and pretty nearly every time he’d have a big bass, or maybe a nice mess of pan-fish for us to cook for our dinner. We were all glad we made him a member.

All this while Mr. Tidd was working steady on his turbine, and it was getting nearer and nearer to being ready for a trial to see if the model would work and do what he thought it was going to do. He didn’t do anything else but work in the barn and read the Decline and Fall and forget things. I mean he didn’t have any job, but lived on money that he had in the bank. If it hadn’t been for that he’d have had to go on being a machinist all the rest of his life, and probably wouldn’t ever have had time to do any inventing.

With all his forgetting and absent-mindedness and inventing he was one of the most patient men. I never heard him speak sharp, and, no matter what happened, good or bad, he took it just the same, not seeming much disturbed; and always simple and kind-spoken to everybody. He always would stop to answer questions or explain things or just talk to us boys if we came into the shop, and never told us to get out or quit bothering him. Nothing bothered him. But Mrs. Tidd wasn’t that way. She’d worry and worry, and sometimes when she was flying around up to her ears in work she’d out with something cross, not meaning it at all, but letting it fly off the tip of her tongue. But she was never short with Mr. Tidd and never exasperated with him, no matter what he forgot or did wrong.

All four of us—that is, Mark and Plunk and Binney and me—went out to Mr. Tidd’s shop to ask if Mark could come with us and camp Friday night and Saturday and Saturday night and Sunday at our cave. The rest of us had asked and could go if we wanted to. We wanted to, but we didn’t want to without Mark.

Mr. Tidd was tinkering and filing and fussing around with some little parts of his turbine, and we had to speak two or three times before he heard us; then he turned around surprised-like and said, “Bless my soul, bless my soul,” as if we had just come from a thousand miles away in an airship. He laid down his tools and leaned his arm on his bench and stared at us a minute. Then he said “Bless my soul” again and reached for his handkerchief.

“You’ve got it tied around your neck,” Binney told him.

Mr. Tidd felt and found it where Binney said. “Well, well,” he sort of whispered. “However come that there?”

“Pa,” began Mark, “can I go camping at the cave? The fellers are goin’.”

“Camping,” said Mr. Tidd; “camping at the cave? To be sure—at the cave. Um! What cave?”

“Our cave,” we all said at once.

We told him all about it, and he was as interested as could be, asking questions and nodding his head and smiling, just like he wanted to go to the cave himself.

“Can I go, pa?” Mark asked, when we were through.

“Far’s I’m concerned you can,” said Mr. Tidd, “but you better ask your ma. She sort of looks after such things. I guess she looks after everything; and, Mark, when you ask her see if she knows where my shoes are. I swan I couldn’t find ’em this mornin’ when I came out—couldn’t find hide nor hair of ’em. It does beat all how things get lost.”

Mrs. Tidd was dusting the parlor when we went in, and had a cloth tied around her hair. She was just flying around, poking behind things and into corners and going as fast as if she had to have it all done in two minutes.

“Ma,” Mark says, poking his head through the door, “can I go campin’ with the fellers?”

“No,” says Mrs. Tidd, without turning her head. Then she stopped a second and felt of her hair. “What’s that you say?”

Mark asked her again, and we chipped in and explained.

“Was ever such a boy!” she said to herself. “Here I got all the cleanin’ and dustin’, and bread in the oven. Will you be careful and cover up good at night and not get into any mischief?”

Mark nodded.

“What you going to have to eat?”

I told her we’d bake potatoes and have fish and one thing another.

“You sha’n’t do no sich thing—gain’ without proper food!” And off she flew to the kitchen and got a basket in a jiffy. Into it she put a big chunk of ham, and a loaf of bread and some butter, and a whole pie and half a chocolate cake, and what was left of a pot of baked beans. “There,” says she, “I guess that’ll keep you from starvin’.”

We said good-by and started for the door, but she came running after us. “Mark,” she says, “you take these gray blankets, and, mind you, bring them back again or you’ll hear from me.” Then she kissed him and flew back to her dusting again.

We had all of our things in the front yard, and it didn’t take us any time to get them packed on our backs and start for the river. It was only about half an hour’s walk, but it took us a little longer to get there on account of Mark, who wanted to rest every little while; but it wasn’t really resting he wanted; it was a piece of his mother’s cake. We ate it all up before we got to the cave at all.

We got at the cave from the top of the hill and threw our things down on the slope in front. It was a little chilly in the shade, so Mark told us to gather wood for a fire while he packed things away the way they ought to be. I guess we were gone twenty minutes. When we came back everything was just where we left it, and Mark was standing looking into the cave with his face wrinkled up like it gets when he’s puzzled.

“Been workin’ hard, ain’t you?” sings out Plunk.

Usually Mark would have said something back, but this time he didn’t. He turned around and asks, “Have any of you been here since last Saturday?”

Nobody had.

“S-somebody’s been in the cave.”

“How do you know?” I asked him.

“Things been moved around, and some p-p-potaters is gone,” he stuttered.

“Let’s look,” says Binney; and we all crowded in. Mark knew where everything ought to be, even if we didn’t, and he told us just what had been touched and what hadn’t. “He used the f-fryin’-pan,” he grumbled. “Look!”

Sure enough, there was the frying-pan with grease sticking to the bottom, and we never left it that way.

“Wonder who it could have been?” says Plunk.

“Maybe it was Uncle Ike,” guessed Binney.

“No,” says Mark, “he’d ’a’ cleaned the pan.”

That was right. We knew he wouldn’t leave any dirty dishes around.

Well, it kind of upset us. Of course, the cave wasn’t ours, and anybody could come into it that wanted to, but nobody ever did. It was such a little cave that it didn’t amount to much to look at, and it was quite a climb; and now here was somebody poking into our things, and it made us pretty sore.

“Probably some feller come along fishin’ and happened onto it,” Binney guessed.

It didn’t do any good to bother about it, so we set to work and packed our things away and got a fire ready to light. In front of the cave was a little patch of sand—white sand crumbled off the sandstone that the cave was carved out of, I guess—and it was there we had our fires and did our cooking. Mark always fixed the fires, because he knew how to pile the sticks and get them to blazing even if the wind was blowing like sixty. Now he was crouched down ready to strike a match when all of a sudden he said something like he was startled.

“What’s matter?” I asked him.

He didn’t answer, but bent over and looked at something in the sand. Somehow I felt shivery all at once without any reason, and walked over where he was to see what he was looking at. There in the sand was some kind of a footprint; it was a bare foot, but big, bigger than two ordinary men’s feet, with the toes growing sort of sideways. I looked at Mark, and he looked at me.

“What made it?” I whispered. For a minute it didn’t seem safe to speak out loud.

“I dunno,” says Mark, with his eyes big and his face serious. “Looks like a man if the toes weren’t on sideways.”

We called Plunk and Binney, but they couldn’t make anything out of it, so we built the fire good and big, just in case it was some kind of a wild animal. We knew animals were afraid of fire.

It was Binney who thought about the frying-pan. “It must be a man, or it wouldn’t have used the pan,” he says.

That was right. Animals don’t cook. Plunk drew a long breath. “Maybe it’s a wild man,” he said, trembly voiced.

“Like there was with that circus last summer,” I said, remembering the pictures in front of the tent of seven men catching a thing all hair and beard, with skins on it for clothes, and big teeth. We all got closer to the fire.

“Bosh!” snorts Mark; but his voice was a little dry, and he didn’t look any too comfortable. “There ain’t any wild men.” But he didn’t believe it and we didn’t believe it.

“What had we better do?” asks Binney.

“Nothing,” says Plunk, letting on he wasn’t afraid. “It won’t hurt anybody even if it is a wild man. And, besides, there are four of us.”

That wasn’t so very encouraging, judging from the size of the footprint. Anything with a foot as big as that could take four boys at a bite.

“Had we better stay?” Binney was pretty scared and showed it.

“Of course,” Plunk told him. “We ain’t babies. We got to stay.”

We couldn’t very well back down after that. I expect every one of us was willing enough to pack up and go, but nobody would start it, so we sat close to the blaze and talked about other things, and made believe to one another that wild men were the last thing in the world we’d ever think of running away from.

It began to get dark, and we cooked supper. It wasn’t a very cheerful meal because every once in a while one of us would stop to listen and ask, “What was that?” There were lots of noises, like there always are in the woods, but they never seemed so shivery before. The moon didn’t come up till late, and it was dark as a pocket except where our fire lighted things up for a few feet.

“We ought to have a gun,” said Plunk, after we had been quiet a long time.

“Bosh!” said Mark. “Let’s go to b-b-bed.”

“We got to have a guard,” says Binney. “The Ku Klux Klan wouldn’t camp without a sentinel.”

We agreed to that. The night was divided into watches, and we drew pieces of stick to show who would watch first. I drew the shortest piece, and the other fellows went into the cave and wrapped themselves up in their blankets. I sat out by the fire, and I can tell you it was pretty lonesome and scary.

CHAPTER VI

After a while I could hear Mark snoring inside the cave, and it made me sort of mad. Anybody would think he’d been brought up next-door neighbor to a wild man or whatever kind of a thing it was that went around leaving marks in the sand a foot long, with the toes turned toward the side. I crept over to the opening and looked in. All three of them were asleep, and if I felt lonely and skittish before I pretty nearly went into a panic now. The fire was going good, but I threw on more wood just to have something to do and to light up farther into the woods.

Pretty soon the moon came up, and that made it seem chillier. It was as if the light was cold—it looked as if it was. I edged closer to the fire, where the blaze almost scorched my shins, and crouched there, with my heart beating thump, thump, and my insides feeling as if they were shriveling together for lack of anything to hold them out like they ought to be. I looked at my watch, hoping my turn on guard was over. Only a little more than a half-hour of it was gone!

The moon got higher, and the woods, instead of just being black as if a curtain was hanging all around me, got shadowy, and the shadows moved. Give me black darkness any time to the kind where there are patches of light and patches of shadows that keep shifting and oozing around; when the woods look that way you feel certain something is hiding and watching you in the places where the light isn’t.

I got the hatchet and put it between my knees, but it didn’t make me feel much better. I tried whittling, but I couldn’t keep my eyes on it; they wanted to wander around to see if anything was sneaking up on me. I thought about lots of things, and one of them was that if ever I got home it would take a lot of persuading to get me camping out at night again.

Another half an hour went by, and it seemed as if my hours would never pass. Nothing happened, but sometimes I wished it would. Being afraid something will happen is worse than the thing itself if it comes.

I guess it was about half-past ten when the funniest feeling came over me. It’s hard to tell just what it was, but more than anything else it felt as if somebody’s eyes were bearing on my back, watching and watching; and it felt as if the eyes were bright and as if they’d shine in the dark if I was to turn and look at them. I sat for more than five minutes before I could get up courage to look. When I did I couldn’t see a thing, but, all the same, I was as sure as anything that something had been looking at me.

About fifteen minutes later I heard a noise; it was just as if somebody had slipped on the hillside and scrambled for a minute before he could catch his feet. It might have been a stray sheep, or maybe a coon roaming around in the moonlight, but it didn’t sound like it to me; it sounded bigger and stronger. It was so very still afterward that I was more afraid than ever, because if it had been a sheep I’d have heard him running away, and even a coon would have made some sort of a racket. No, I says to myself, it’s something hiding and sneaking around with an eye on us; it’s the thing that used our pan and stole our potatoes and left that track in the sand.

That was all that happened during my watch, but I was glad when it came time to wake Mark to take my place. He came out rubbing his eyes and blinking at the light.

“Talk to me a minute,” he yawned, “till I git awake.”

We talked a spell, but I didn’t say anything about the noise or that I thought something had been watching me. When he was awake so he wouldn’t doze off again I went in and snuggled into my blanket. I was afraid at first I wouldn’t be able to get to sleep, but before I really got to worrying about it I was gone; and I didn’t dream, either.

In the morning none of us had much to say about his watch during the night. By the looks of the others I’m sure they were just as afraid as I was, but they weren’t letting on and neither was I. Besides, it seemed sort of foolish with the sunlight shining bright through the trees and the water glittering and the birds chittering all around. The woods didn’t look as if there could be anything fearsome or dangerous in them; wild men seemed a long ways away and nothing to worry about, anyhow. What would a wild man be doing right outside of Wicksville? If there was one somebody would have seen it and talked about it before we got there.

We fished all day and played Indian and fixed up a raft out of a couple of old logs and poled ourselves around. In the afternoon we went over on the island and gathered about a bushel of butternuts apiece, but they weren’t any good, having laid all winter.

“We’ll have h-h-ham for supper,” Mark said. “We kin warm it up, and it’ll be pretty good with fish.”

We poled the raft across, carrying our nuts, and made for the cave. Mark went to work building the fire again, Plunk and Binney gathered wood, while I riffled around inside getting things ready for the cooking. I found most of the stuff all right, because Mark had put it away, and he always puts things away careful, but when it came to the ham I couldn’t put my hand on it to save my life.

“Where did you put that ham?” I sang out to Mark.

“Right in that jar,” he told me, “next to the basket.”

“It ain’t here,” I called, after I had looked again to make sure.

“It’s got to be,” says he, his voice a little excited, “because I put it there.”

“Well, it ain’t. Come and see for yourself.”

He came in and rummaged around, but not a sign of the ham could he discover. His face was sober when he looked up at me and says, “Is anythin’ else m-missin’?”

Together we went over the things. Everything was there till we got to the bread. All together we had four loaves. We’d used most of one, and there ought to have been three left, but there wasn’t. There were only two.

“Did you hear anything last night?” asks Mark, sharp-like.

“Yes,” I says. “Did you?”

“I ain’t sure, but I th-thought so.”

“I felt somethin’ watchin’ me,” I told him. “Seemed like its eyes was just borin’ into me when my back was turned.”

“Um!” he grunts. “See anythin’?”

“No.”

“Me neither.”

“There’s somebody prowlin’ around, that’s sure. That ham didn’t git tired of stayin’ an’ run off alone.”

Mark grinned. Then he looked solemn again and nodded.

“Don’t seem very dangerous, though—stealin’ ham. Maybe somebody’s playin’ a joke on us.”

“Nobody’d hang around all night and all day for this much joke.”

He admitted that was right. “But ’tain’t no wild man,” he insisted. “There ain’t none.”

“I dunno,” I says.

And then Binney and Plunk came along with their arms stacked full of wood.

Mark and I kept quiet before them, but we arranged that we’d keep watch to-night by twos instead of all alone. “It’ll be more sociable,” I says; and they jumped at the idea.

Mark and I were to stand guard the first part of the night, and Binney and Plunk would be on watch till morning. That was the way it was fixed. About nine o’clock they turned in, and we went out by the fire.

“Let’s be sure there’s enough wood,” I said to him. “I’d sort of hate to be left out here in the dark.”

He grunted, but I noticed he looked at the pile pretty careful, and even dragged in some pieces that were lying within reach.

For maybe an hour we got along fine. Not a thing happened, and we found lots of things to talk about. We got to figuring about his father’s turbine and what it would do and how much money Mr. Tidd would make out of it, and it sounded pretty important. Some day we were sure there’d be big shops in Wicksville where the engines would be manufactured, and Mark would be general manager when he got through college, and all the rest of us would have good jobs. I was going to be a mechanical engineer some day, so Mark agreed to put me in charge of that department. We figured his father would make maybe four or five thousand dollars in a single year.

“If he m-makes anything,” said Mark.

“But he’s goin’ to.”

“He ain’t got it patented yet.”

“What of it?”

“If somebody got holt of his idee, or stole his drawin’s and got it patented f-f-first, he’d never git a thing out of it.”

“Not a dollar?”

“Not a dollar. There’s always folks tryin’ to steal inventions. Most inventors git cheated out of their money or s-some-thin’.”

THERE, CROUCHING ON THE BROW, WAS THE FIGURE OF A MAN

“Your father better be pretty careful, then,” I says.

“Careful!” grunts Mark. “You know how careful he is—and that feller was in town again.”

“No,” I says, surprised, for I’d never heard of it before.

“He was, but f-father was out of town. He didn’t git no satisfaction.”

“I bet he’s sneakin’ around Wicksville just a-tryin’ to gouge that invention out of your father,” I says.

Mark didn’t answer, and sat so quiet I turned to look at him to see what was the matter. He was sitting stiff, leaning forward a little and staring at the face of a big rock half-way down the hill. There was a shadow on it, and it was the shadow of a man’s head.

The moon was shining bright and throwing shadows just like it did the night before. I noticed now that a big shadow was right over us, reaching down the hill to the rock, where it ended in the head. It looked big as an elephant. Mark sucked in his breath, and we looked at each other. Then we both turned slow and looked up the hill. There, crouching on the brow, was the black figure of a man, like he was on his hands and knees staring over at us. His head stood out sharp, and we could see his hair was long and bushy, standing out on all sides just like some kind of South Sea Island savages that there are pictures of in the geography. There wasn’t any doubt about his being big. It was the whoppingest head I ever saw, and the shoulders matched it for size.

All of a sudden as we looked the man wasn’t there. It seemed like he melted right away under our eyes, and we never heard a sound.

“It was—nothing but a man,” I whispered, trying to persuade myself there wasn’t any danger.

“Yes,” Mark whispered back, “but what k-kind of a man?”

When we got to thinking about his size and how long and bushy his hair was, and especially about that queer footmark with the toes pointing to one side, we couldn’t make head or tail of him, except that there was something mighty strange, and that it would be a good thing to keep out of his way. I tell you it wasn’t fun sitting there a couple of miles from a house, without a gun, and with a giant of a man like that prowling around watching you and intending to do nobody knew what.

“Shall we tell the others?” I asked.

Mark thought a minute. “No,” he says. “’Twon’t do no good. We’ll keep mum.”

That is what we did. When our watch was over we waked Plunk and Binney, and they came out to the fire yawning and stretching. We turned in.

I don’t know when it was, but I was woke up by a yelling and hollering outside the cave. Mark and I jumped out, and there were Plunk and Binney screeching as if they were scared to death and throwing blazing chunks of wood out among the trees after a big black figure that ran and leaped and crashed down the hill and out of sight.

“What was it?” I said, shaking Binney by the shoulder.

“I—I guess,” he said, shaking like a leaf, “that it was a goriller. He didn’t look like anythin’ else.”

A gorilla! Come to think of it, it might be a gorilla, but where in time would one of them come from?

Anyhow, there was no more sleep that night. We all sat up together and kept the fire roaring and blazing as bright as we could. We weren’t troubled again.

In the morning Binney says, while we were getting breakfast, “I guess we better go home.”

Plunk didn’t say anything, and I waited for Mark.

“I ain’t goin’ home,” he says. “I’m goin’ to f-find out what it is. Will you stay with me, Tallow?”

“Sure,” I says, but I didn’t want to a bit.

That sort of shamed Plunk and Binney into staying, so nobody went home.

“And, rem-member,” Mark warned us, “this is a secret. We ain’t to say a word to nobody.”

So we were sort of forced to stay by Mark to help him find out what was prowling around in the woods. He was a queer fellow, Mark was. I know he was as afraid as any of us, but he was curious, and when he got curious to know anything you couldn’t scare him away nohow.

CHAPTER VII

“Have you hatched a scheme?” I asked Mark, after we’d scoured off the dishes and cleaned up in front of the cave.

“I got a scheme, but I don’t like it much.”

“Won’t it work?”

“I guess it’ll work.”

“What’s wrong with it, then? You want one that’ll work, don’t you?”

“I ain’t sure,” says he, with a grin. “Sometimes it ain’t desirable to c-catch what you’re after. I dunno just what I’d do with a wild man if I was to get him.”

“You might sell him to a circus,” says Binney, who always took things serious, and couldn’t see a joke if the point was printed out for him.

“What’s the scheme?” I was getting pretty impatient to know.

“Make believe we’ve gone away,” says Mark. “Then he’ll come prowlin’ around. Three of us go over to the island and holler and raise a r-racket. One will stay in the cave. He’ll think we’re all gone.”

“It’s a good scheme,” I says, “for the feller that stays in the cave.”

“That’s the trouble,” Mark grins.

“Who d’you think’ll be fool enough to stay in the cave to catch Mister Wild Man?”

“Me,” says Mark.

“You dassen’t.”

“That’s what I’m wonderin’,” he owns up.

We sat a while without saying a word, then Mark clicks his teeth and says, “I’m goin’ to try it.”

“You ain’t,” I says. “He’ll bust you in two.”

“I don’t b’lieve so. At any rate, I don’t in daylight.”

“You ain’t foolin’?”

“N-no.”

“And you want us to go over to the island and kick up a row like there was four of us, so’s he’ll think nobody’s here?”

“Yes.”

“Come on, fellers,” I says. “If Mark’s gump enough to play he’s bait in a bear-trap I guess we can kick up his racket for him.” We got up and started down hill, leaving Mark in front of the cave looking after us sort of regretful. We weren’t more than half-way down before I began to feel on bad terms with myself. Somehow it didn’t look just right to go off deserting Mark, especially after binding ourselves to stick together in whatever peril come when we made up the Ku Klux Klan.

“Wait a minute,” I told Binney and Plunk. “This ain’t no way to do. You fellers got to yell loud enough for four; can you do it?”

“I guess so,” says Plunk. “Why?”

“’Cause I’m goin’ back to stick with Mark,” I grunted, kind of sharp. “There ain’t nobody in Wicksville goin’ to say I ain’t got as much sand as Mark Tidd.”

“I sha’n’t go back,” Binney says. “I didn’t ask him to stay.”

“Me too,” agreed Plunk.

“Nobody asked you to go back. Somebody’s got to do the hollerin’ on the island, ain’t they? Well, all you got to do is sound like a whole picnic. Now git.”

I went back up the hill cautious and sneaking and sat down just back of Mark. He didn’t hear me till I slipped, and then the way he jumped reminded me of a big rubber ball bounding.

“Whillisker!” he panted, “but you scairt me!”

“Too bad. If I scairt you what’ll the wild man do?”

He grinned kind of sickly. “What you doin’ here?”

“I come to stay,” I says. “Plunk and Binney can make enough row.”

He looked pretty thankful, but tried not to show it. “There ain’t no need,” he says.

“If you don’t want me I’ll git out,” I told him.

He grinned again. “I dunno’s I’d go as far’s kickin’ you out. If you’re g-goin’ to stay let’s git inside the cave.”

We went inside and fixed ourselves as comfortable as we could at the far end, in a sort of recess we’d dug out to put things in, with a piece of canvas hanging down over it, and all the talking we did was in whispers. Somehow we didn’t either of us think of many things to say. I remember after about half an hour of it that I wished if any wild man was coming he’d hurry and have it over with, because my legs were getting cramped. But he didn’t come.

Through the mouth of the cave we could hear Plunk and Binney raising a racket that sounded as if all the kids in Wicksville were mixed up in one big fight.

“They’re doin’ fine,” whispers Mark.

“Yes,” I says, “and I bet they’re enjoyin’ it more’n I am this.”

It began to look as if Mark’s scheme wasn’t any good, for we sat there more than two hours, and I was sure my legs would snap off if I moved, they were so stiff.

“Come on,” I whispered, “let’s get out of this. Nobody’s comin’.”

“Hus-ss-ssh!”

I listened. Sure enough, there was something moving around outside, slow and cautious. We could hear twigs crackling, and once in a while a sort of scuffling like feet moving through dried grass. Mark’s eyes were fastened on the opening through a slit in the canvas, and they were pretty nearly as big as saucers. When you think how small his eyes usually were you can guess how excited he was now. Probably I looked about the same; I know my heart hammered, and I got that empty feeling like I had in the night, and I wished I was seven miles away with a company of soldiers. But I wasn’t any place but right there, and I had to make the best of it.

The sounds came nearer and nearer and nearer until whoever made them was right outside. Then the opening was darkened, and we could see a big head and shoulders that were as broad as the hole. The head stopped and peered around to make sure nobody was there. We were way in the corner; it was pretty dark, and the canvas was in front of us. So there wasn’t much chance of his seeing us or finding us. He mumbled something to himself and crept way in. I almost hollered right out. He was the biggest man I ever saw, and wild-looking. We couldn’t see his face very well, but he was ragged, and his hair was long and frowsy—and we were alone with him in a little cave, and nobody to help within a couple of miles.

He crawled in on all fours and began fumbling around on the other side of the cave where we had kept the bread. I felt Mark heave himself up, and then saw him creep out of the blankets and across the floor until he was between the door and the wild man. It took more nerve than I had, but, though he was as pale as a sheet, he kept right ahead. He stood still, kind of doubtful, getting up his courage to do something and figuring out just what he was going to do. I felt around for something heavy I could use if worse came to worst.

Mark opened his mouth once, but not a sound came. He shut it again and felt of his throat; then he made his voice sound as deep and heavy as he could and sort of barked: “Hey! W-what you do-doin’ here?”

The wild man jumped so he cracked his head against the roof and turned around rubbing it. For the first time we got a good look at his face when the light from outside struck it fair. I expected he was going to leap right at Mark till I saw his face; and then, somehow, I felt sorry for him and not afraid a bit, for it was the most scared face I ever saw—yes, sir, scared! He fairly cowered against the wall.

“Don’t hurt Sammy. Poor Sammy. Sammy’s hungry,” he whimpered.

Mark and I both giggled, we were so relieved. Mark spoke to him again like he was stern and displeased.

“What you stealin’ our stuff for? Hey?”

“Sammy’s hungry,” said the wild man again. “Don’t hurt Sammy.”

He turned his great, round, simple face to Mark, his big eyes, blue as a baby’s, full of trouble. He smiled like a child will that has been bad and thinks it can get out of it by being specially friendly.

“Come outside,” orders Mark, “where there’s more room.”

We went out on the sand, Mark first, the wild man second, and me last. Out there he could stand up straight, and I tell you when he did I was glad he was so simple and good-natured, and not wild and savage like the pictures in front of the side-show. I’m pretty well grown for my age, but I couldn’t have reached to the top of his head even standing tiptoe. My father is six foot one, so I’m used to seeing a big man, but our wild man must have been a head taller than dad. Afterward we got him to let us measure him, and he turned out to be six foot six and a half—almost tall enough to be a giant in a museum. And he was broad, too. When he turned his back it looked as wide as a dining-room table.

His face was round and innocent, like I said before, and good-natured. His hair was black as Mr. Whittaker’s stallion and as coarse as the horse’s tail—coarse and straight. Take it and his smooth, coppery skin, and we made sure he was an Indian. He was, almost.

He was all ragged, with great holes torn in his clothes. I looked at his feet. One of them had a shoe on, and the other was bare. The bare one was the foot that had scared us so when we saw its print in the sand by the cave with the toes pointing sideways. Now we understood, for that foot was twisted and sort of crumpled up like it had been hurt a long time ago and healed wrong. But with all that he hardly limped a bit, and how he could run!

“Don’t send Sammy back,” he begged. “Sammy wants to stay here. Don’t tell on Sammy.”

“Back where?” asks Mark.

“Back to the big farm. Sammy ran away.... They make Sammy sleep in the house, and they make him dig and work, and they won’t ever let him go fishing. Don’t send Sammy back.”

“He means the poor-farm, I guess,” I said to Mark; and he nodded.

“How did you get sent to the poor-farm?”

Sammy always spoke about himself as if he were somebody else. I never heard him say “I” as long as I have known him. It made him seem very simple and childish and feeble-minded, but Sammy knew and thought a whole lot more than folks gave him credit for. He knew how many apples it took to make six, all right, and lots of things besides. But, after all, he was just like a little boy, a little frightened boy with a great big body.

He told us all about himself, and it was so interesting to listen to that we clean forgot all about Plunk and Binney and dinner until he was through. He said he was born in a lumber camp that used to be in the neighborhood a good many years ago, before the pine was cut off. His father was half French and half Indian, and his mother was mostly Indian. He couldn’t remember much about being little, because he wasn’t very old when he got hurt some way with a falling tree or a log on a rollway or something, and it almost killed him. That’s how he got his twisted foot, and probably he got a knock on the head that spoiled his brains.

For a long time he lived with his father in a little shack over beyond Loon Lake, which was about seven miles away, and nobody had bothered him. He and his father had fished and hunted and one thing and another so as to get enough to eat. Then his father died and left Sammy all alone. He got along pretty good until winter, and it was a hard winter, so that there wasn’t much hunting, and he almost starved. When he came into town to get something to eat, begging, they clapped him into jail and then sent him off to the poor-farm.

It took him a long time to tell all of this, because every little while he’d stop and look at us pitiful and beg us not to tell on him or send him back, and then he’d go on again, but all the time he kept his eyes on us and started nervous-like whenever a twig snapped or a bird peeped back in the woods.

“Well,” says Mark, “I s’pose you’re a sort of wild man; but I’m glad you ain’t the kind we thought you were.”

“Sammy’s nice. Everybody like Sammy, sure.”

“About sendin’ him back,” I says to Mark, “it ain’t goin’ to be done. He’s Injun, and the woods and things is for Injuns, not poorfarms. He hadn’t ought to be shut up no more than a robin or a chipmunk, and he ain’t goin’ to be if I can help it.”

Sammy looked at me out of his big eyes so grateful I had to blink, and then he reached out with his great paw and patted the back of my hand.

“Boy good to Sammy,” he said. “Kind in his heart to poor Sammy.”

“Sure,” I told him; and there was a kind of a chunk in my throat.

“No,” says Mark, “he ain’t goin’ back. We’ll hide him and p-p-purtect him and shield him from his enemies.”

“Enemies?” I says. “He ain’t got no enemies that I know of. The folks at the poor-farm ain’t his enemies; they’re tryin’ to be kind to him.”

“Rats!” he snaps, disgusted as could be. “Maybe they ain’t enemies one way of lookin’ at it, but we kin play they are.”

“I s’pose so.”

“Anyhow, we won’t tell, and we’ll help him all we can.”

Sammy smiled so he showed all his white, even teeth, and bobbed his head at Mark.

“Fat boy good. Sammy like fat boy—sure.”

“I s’pose they’ll be lookin’ for him,” I guessed.

“’Tain’t likely they’ll strain theirselves,” Mark says. “All Sammy’s got to do is lay l-low.”

“He can live in our cave.”

“Sammy live in cave—sure. Roll in blanket and sleep. Catch fish in river, shoot, hunt.”

“You haven’t any gun.”

He looked real crafty and half closed his eyes while he bobbed his head back and forth. “Sammy got gun—sure. Good gun.”

All of a sudden we remembered Plunk and Binney, and I jumped up and put my hands to my mouth to holler at them, but I happened to glance at Sammy, who looked like he was ready to jump and run, so I stopped and explained to him. He quieted down, and then I hollered. I had to holler two or three times before I got an answer, but after a while I could hear them hooting back at me. I told them to come on, and in about five minutes they came tearing up the hill. I guess they never expected to see us again, the way they looked. And surprised!—you never saw anything like it. They were a little sorry, too, that they hadn’t stayed. You see, nobody’d got hurt, and they might as well have had the credit for being brave. That’s the way with lots of folks. They can figure out after the time is passed what they ought to have done the week before.

Well, we held a meeting of the Ku Klux Klan right there, and voted Sammy our ward. Mark found out he was that. Indians, he said, were the wards of the nation, and ward meant somebody that was looked after and taken care of, so he guessed that’s what Sammy was to us. Sammy was agreeable, and grinned and grinned and bobbed his head and said “Sure, sure, sure” every little while.

It was getting about time for us to go home, so we left Sammy all the things to eat and as many dishes as we dared, and told him we’d be back to see him in a day or two and bring more grub. Then we shook hands all round, and off we went with the first real big secret we’d ever had, and I tell you we felt pretty important over it.

CHAPTER VIII

If we’d known what a trouble Sammy was going to be to us all through the winter, I guess we’d have been more careful about making him our ward. But we’d done it, and there was nothing for us but to stand by him—and he did have a monstrous appetite. After winter came on we pretty nearly had to feed him. He did get things to eat besides what we took him—chicken sometimes, I guess, and things like that. We never asked how he got them, and he never told us, but I don’t imagine it was best for folks in that neighborhood to leave things laying after dark.

We were afraid he’d freeze to death, but the cold never seemed to bother him. In the cave he had some old quilts and a piece of carpet he used to hang across the opening to shut out the wind. When he built a fire on the sand before the cave it was surprising how warm it got inside, and then he’d drop his curtain, and it seemed like the heat would stay for hours after the fire was gone.

Of course, he couldn’t stay in the cave all the time, and, though we cautioned him, he did go prowling around the country a good deal, even on the roads. Once or twice he was seen at night, and one farmer came lashing his horse into town with a story of being chased by a ghost twenty feet high with hair two yards long. We knew who the ghost was, all right, though we couldn’t see why Sammy chased the man. He told us it was just for fun. That’s the way he was, a regular little boy, and how he did love to play pranks! What with him sneaking around that section and with people missing things and catching glimpses of him in the darkness, the locality got a bad name. It doesn’t take long for a place to get a bad name; and, no matter how much folks don’t believe in ghosts, they’re ready to believe in something or other. I don’t believe in them, and Mark says there isn’t any such thing, but all the same there are times when the chills run all over you and you know there’s something that isn’t flesh and blood right behind you.

All that winter we lugged things to eat out to the cave, usually a couple of times a week, and when the drifts were high it was pretty hard work. But Sammy was always grateful, and when you come to think about what came later, and how valuable Sammy was to us, I shouldn’t wonder if he was worth more than our trouble.

During the winter Mr. Tidd worked harder than ever on his turbine, and before the last snow was off the ground he had his working model, or whatever he called it, about ready for a trial. He was excited and we were excited, but it was Mark that thought of something that gave us all a setback.

“How you goin’ to try it? You ain’t got any s-steam.”

Mr. Tidd scratched his head and looked at Mark reproachful-like, as if calling his attention to it was as bad as if Mark had come right up and taken steam away from him that he’d been saving for the purpose.

“It won’t run without steam,” he said, slow and worried. “Without steam a-sissin’ and strainin’ and workin’ it won’t do nothin’. It might just as well be a bag of potaters for all the good it is. Well, well! Um!” After a minute he brightened up like he always did. Worry and Mr. Tidd never could stay together long. “There’s some way out of it,” he said, “some way out of it. The trouble—the trouble seems to be, now I think of it, that no way comes into my head.”

He sighed and pulled a volume of the Decline and Fall out of his pocket and commenced to read. In less than a minute he’d forgotten all about us and the turbine and the steam and everything else in the world but those old Roman folks that went tearing and rampaging all over the world without much regard for anybody’s feelings, so I’ve always thought. How Mr. Tidd, a gentle, nice man, could be fond of such characters as those Romans was a mystery to me. He used to read pieces out of the Decline and Fall to us, and in the course of a year I calculate we heard most all of it. I can’t remember that those folks ever did anything but fight. From morning till night they were picking on somebody. What I’d like to know is, if the whole nation was always fighting, who tended the post-office and ran the stores and looked after things at home? Quite likely the womenfolks had to do that while their husbands were gallivanting around in Gaul or Egypt or other foreign parts. To my mind those Romans were a ridiculous lot.

“If you haven’t got steam here,” I said, trying to puzzle it out, “I guess you’ll have to take your model where steam is.”

“What’s that?” Mr. Tidd asked, looking up from his book. “What’s that? Oh yes. Of course.”

“Don’t you know anybody that’s got steam that’ll lend some to you?”

Mr. Tidd thought. Then he slapped his knee. “There’s Mr. Whiteley over at the power-plant. Him and me has got pretty friendly, one way and another. He’s got steam. Now, do you s’pose he’d be willin’? Do you?”

“I don’t see why he shouldn’t,” I told him; and Mark nodded his head once or twice to show he agreed.

The upshot of it was that Mr. Tidd went to see Mr. Whiteley and got permission to set up his turbine in a corner of the room where the engines and things were to give it a trial. When we found that out—I mean Binney and Plunk and me—we were all as wrought up about it as though it was our father doing the inventing.

Mr. Tidd put in about a week finishing his turbine and setting it up in the engine-room. We went down to see it when it was all ready. It was to be tried out the next morning. Tucked away in a corner of the engine-room it didn’t look like much. It was little and boxed in so you couldn’t see any of the machine parts that made it go, and somehow didn’t seem very important when you compared it with the big wheels and beams and one thing and another on the engine that stood, all shining with brass, in the middle of the floor. We felt a sort of sinking.

But Mr. Tidd was humming and happy. He patted his little contraption and beamed and beamed. Then he’d look over at the big engine and smile scornful-like. “This here leetle feller,” he said, “will do most as much work as you will, with all your size and brass and roarin’. You want to look out, for this leetle feller is goin’ to be the death of you, and don’t you forget it!”

“Mr. Tidd,” said Mr. Whiteley, “I hope you aren’t too confident. It won’t be too big a disappointment if it fails to work?”

“Fails to work! Why, it will work, Mr. Whiteley. It—”

“But lots of others have failed—men with technical educations, eminent engineers.”

“They didn’t know what I know, Mr. Whiteley. Not what I know. No, sir. The Tidd turbine’s goin’ to do what it ought to. You see.”

We left the engine-room, and Mark went home with his father. The trial was to come off at nine o’clock the next morning, and we were to be there. It was a promise. Nobody was to see it but Mr. Tidd and Mr. Whiteley and us four boys. Of course the engineer would be there, but he didn’t count—or we thought so, anyhow.

Binney and I were on hand before eight o’clock, and we had a whole hour to hang around. It was tiresome waiting by the door, so we got up and prowled around the building just to pass away the time and see what we could see. After a while we got tired and sat down on a plank that ran across a couple of oil barrels under a window of the engine-room and made ourselves comfortable. The window was open, and I could hear voices inside, but I supposed it was the engineer talking to some of his help and didn’t think anything about it until whoever it was came closer. It was the engineer, all right, but I couldn’t make out from the sound who was with him, though there was something familiar about the voice.

“They’re goin’ to turn steam into the thing at nine o’clock,” said the engineer. “Funny-lookin’ contraption, ain’t it?”

“Um!” said the other man. “Why didn’t you telegraph me sooner?”

“I didn’t know when they was goin’ to be ready until yestiddy. Soon’s I found out I sent off a wire right off. Anyhow, you’re here, ain’t you?”

“Yes,” said the man, in a kind of a grunt. “What d’you s’pose is inside the thing?”

“Hain’t got no idee. What are you so all-fired int’rested in it for? You don’t reckon this coot of a Tidd has up and invented somethin’, do you?”

“You can never tell, my friend,” said the man; and all at once I recognized his voice. It was the same man that we saw on the depot platform and that tried to get Mr. Tidd to show him his drawings and patterns and things last fall—the fellow that worked for some machinery company in Pittsburg.

“Confound it,” he went on, snappishly, “he’s got it all covered up with casing so’s you can’t see into it at all. Wonder what his idea is. Can’t we pry into it and see?”

I calculated it was about time to do something, so I stuck my head in the window and hollered, like I’d just got there, “Hey, Mr. Willis”—which was the engineer’s name—“open the door, will you please? Mr. Tidd’ll be here in a minute, and we want to git in.”

I saw the stranger kick the floor like he was mighty mad, but there wasn’t anything Mr. Willis could do but let us in, so he didn’t get to see into the engine that time. When we got inside the stranger was gone.

“Somebody with you, wasn’t there?” I asked Mr. Willis.

He grunted out a yes, and then jerked his head back through the engine-room. “Feller tryin’ to sell oil. He just went out the other way.”

“Oh,” I says; but I didn’t believe he was selling oil or that he was gone very far away. You don’t telegraph men to come and try to sell you things.

It wasn’t more than five minutes before Mr. Tidd and Mark and Plunk came in with Mr. Whiteley.

“Everything ready?” Mr. Whiteley asked the engineer; and Willis nodded that it was. Mr. Tidd went over to his turbine and began fiddling around with it, and I grabbed Mark by the arm and whispered in his ear, “That feller’s here.”

“What feller?”

“The sneakin’ one. That one that’s after your father’s turbine. He’s hidin’ here somewheres. The engineer’s a friend of his’n and telegraphed him to come.”

“Sure?” Mark asked, sharp.

“I saw him and heard him.”

Mark took hold of his fat cheek with his finger and thumb and pinched it. His little eyes were going here and there around the machinery and into corners, and he was thinking hard.

“He’s hidin’ where he can s-s-see,” he says, half to himself.

“Of course,” I told him, “that’s what he came for.”

Now, if it had been me I’d have told Mr. Tidd and Mr. Whiteley right off and had the stranger put out; but that wasn’t Mark’s way. He always wanted to engineer things differently and be original about it. If there was an easy way, like there was now, and some other way that had to be puzzled and figured over, he’d choose that way every time. I knew there wasn’t any use in my saying anything, so I just waited to see what would happen.

“I dunno’s it will do any harm if he d-does see it run. He can’t find out nothin’. Maybe it’s a good thing he came. Havin’ him sneakin’ round like this may show father he ain’t to be trusted. Eh?”

I could see there was something in that. If we could get it into Mr. Tidd’s head that all the world wasn’t as honest as a prayer-meeting we’d be doing something pretty valuable.

“It’s your business,” I told him, “and you can run it the way you want to.”

He kept peering around cautious, and finally he decided the stranger was hiding in one of two places. One of them was a sort of toolroom right across from where we stood; the other place was a dark cubbyhole under the stairs. He could see all right from either place.

Mr. Tidd was all ready now to begin his trial. He told the engineer to turn on his steam, and we all stood around, almost forgetting to breathe. We could see the steam climbing up in the gauge he’d fixed until it showed there was a hundred pounds of pressure.

“There,” he says, “that’s enough. Now we’re agoin’ to see the Tidd turbine set about its business. There’s no doubt about it; not a mite.”

“Don’t be too confident,” warns Mr. Whiteley.

Mr. Tidd only smiled and turned a little thing that let the steam into his turbine. Pretty soon there came a sort of purring like a cat, only not so loud; maybe it was more like the whirring of an electric fan. We couldn’t see the machine shake or anything, and it didn’t look to me like a thing had happened. But Mr. Tidd was dancing up and down, and saying “I told you so!” and slapping his hip with his big hand, and acting in general like he had gone crazy.

Mr. Whiteley looked at him sort of queer, like he was afraid he really had gone out of his head, and says: “Hold hard; Tidd, get a grip on yourself. She may work yet.”

Mr. Tidd stopped capering and stared at Mr. Whiteley with his mouth open. “May work yet!” he says. “May work yet! Ho, ho! May work yet! Do you hear that hummin’, Mr. Whiteley, and that purrin’? And, Mr. Whiteley, do you see that shaft a-turnin’? Ho, ho! I knew it!”

“Do you mean the thing’s working?” demanded Mr. Whiteley.

“She’s a-turnin’ her rotator this very second about twelve thousand times a minute,” says Mr. Tidd, “and she’s a-stirrin’ up close to a hundred horse-power.”

“Impossible!” says Mr. Whiteley.

“Measure it, then,” sings Mr. Tidd. “Measure it.”

The engineer brought Mr. Whiteley a couple of little brass things, and he hitched them onto the turbine. The one that measured the revolutions seemed to go plum crazy for a while, then it settled down to business, and Mr. Whiteley bent over to read what it said. He rubbed his eyes and looked again. “Tidd,” he said, all excited, “Tidd, it can’t be possible! It can’t! But this says you’re making fourteen thousand revolutions to the minute.”

“What’s she doin’ in the way of horse-power?” Mr. Tidd chuckled.

Mr. Whiteley fussed around a while till he found out.

“It says the machine’s turning up one hundred and two horse-power,” he says, kind of hushed like. With that he walked over to Mr. Tidd and put out his hand. “Mr. Tidd,” says he, “you’ve done it. You’ve come close to revolutionizing the business of applying power, and you’re going to be a rich man.”

“Wait,” says Mr. Tidd. “You hain’t seen it all. What’s one of the greatest obstacles now in the turbine?”

“The difficulty of reversing.”

“Watch,” says Mr. Tidd. He turned a cock one place and turned another at the opposite end. “There,” says he; “she’s reversed.”

“What!” Mr. Whiteley said, his face all twisted up with astonishment.

“Fact,” grins Mr. Tidd. “Fact, gen-u-ine fact. As sure as that Cæsar conquered Gaul.” “Have you got your patent?”

“Nope. Couldn’t get it till I proved she’d work. But I’m goin’ to git it quick now, you can bet, perty sudden.”

Mark sort of scrooged up to his father. “Father,” he says, “come here a minute. I want to show you and Mr. Whiteley somethin’.”

They looked at him surprised-like.

“Over here.” Mark points.

He walks to the toolroom and points. “Here it is,” he says, “a-crouchin’ in here. C-come out!” he tells the stranger.

The stranger, seeing there wasn’t anything else to do, did come out looking flustered and a little greasy where he’d squeezed up against things. “What’s this?” snaps Mr. Whiteley. “What are you doing here?”

The man didn’t say anything for a minute, and I noticed the engineer was looking pretty uncomfortable. Mark spoke right up, though.

“He was sneakin’ around to see father’s engine work. He’s been s-s-spyin’ around a year, he has. He works for some engineerin’ company in Pittsburg.”

“I have been watching Mr. Tidd’s progress with his turbine,” said the stranger, in a make-believe honest kind of voice. “I represent capital, and Mr. Tidd will need capital to market and manufacture his invention. It was my desire to see how he came out before I raise his hopes by offering him financial support.”

“It was a queer way you took,” Mr. Whiteley said, and his voice sounded unpleasant. “You’ve found out it works, all right. Now git!” He took a step forward, and the stranger looked like he was startled plenty. He didn’t wait to make any more explanations, but hurried out of the engine-room.

“Tidd,” said Mr. Whiteley, “you want to look out. The best thing you can do is to get off after your patent and protect yourself. If you don’t you’ll just be another inventor cheated out of the profits of his invention—and yours is a big one.”

“I guess,” answered Mr. Tidd, “that you’re right.” His eyes looked sorry—sorry, I guess, to find out anybody was so dishonest. “You’re right. I’ll go to-morrow—to-morrow.”

He did go next day, down to Detroit to see a patent lawyer that Mr. Whiteley told him was all right. Before he went he brought his turbine back to his shop in the barn and put a new padlock on both doors. It was while he was away that the things happened which gave the Ku Klux Klan a chance to show what it was made of.

CHAPTER IX

Next day Mr. Tidd went packing off to Detroit to see the patent lawyer, and we were all at the depot to send him off. So was Mrs. Tidd. She always came to see him off, she said, because if she didn’t there was no knowing whether he went or not, or where he went to. Once, she told us, he had started alone to go to a town twenty miles east of where they lived, and two days after she had got a letter from him saying he was in another town thirty miles west and wanted to know what he came there for.

She stood by him while he bought his ticket, and then pinned it inside his coat pocket with the end sticking out a little so the conductor could see it.

“If the end don’t show,” she said to him, “you’ll never find it, and like as not you’ll git put off the train. Now when the conductor comes along he can see it and tell you where it is.”

Mr. Tidd smiled at her as patient as could be and patted her hand. Then he felt to see that the Decline and Fall was in his pocket all right, and smiled again at everybody. He was one of the smilingest men I ever saw, and as soon as you saw him do it you liked him right off, whether you knew him or not.

“I’ve put a paper in your satchel, right on the top, telling you just what to do. When you git there you pin it on the wall right over the washstand, and don’t you dare to go out of the hotel without readin’ it. It tells about puttin’ on a clean collar, and to be sure not to go traipsin’ around without a tie, and such-like. Don’t you go neglectin’ it, now.”

“I won’t, my dear, I won’t.”

The train came snorting in, and Mr. Tidd got aboard all right without forgetting his satchel. We reminded him of it. He sat down in the smoking-car and smiled at us through the windows, and Mrs. Tidd shook her finger at him like she was warning him not to forget anything. Then the bell rang and the conductor hollered “All aboard,” and he was gone.

“I’ll never draw an easy breath till he’s back again” said Mrs. Tidd, and she came close to the truth, for she did draw a lot of uneasy breaths before she saw Mr. Tidd again, and so did the rest of us. In fact, I guess there aren’t many folks who have drawn as many uneasy ones as we did for the next several days.

We took Mrs. Tidd home and then looked around for something to do. First we thought we’d go up to see Sammy at the cave, but Mark said he’d gone off up the river fishing and maybe wouldn’t be back that night, so we all sat down on Tidd’s front fence and whittled and talked and wished something would turn up.

“I guess I could git our horse and rig,” Binney said, after a while, “and we could take a ride out into the country if we wanted to.”

“That’s better’n nothin’,” I told him; and the other fellows seemed to agree, so we went off to Binney’s house, and his mother, after arguing a while and telling him the horse would run away and break all our necks, finished up by saying we could go. We took the two-seated rig. Plunk and Binney sat in the front seat, and Mark and I got in behind, which made it pretty crowded for me.

“Which way’ll we go?” Binney wanted to know.

“Let’s go up the river-road,” Plunk said. “Maybe we’ll meet Sammy somewheres with a string of fish and he’ll give us some.”

We started off and drove along slow, because Binney’s horse couldn’t be made to go any faster, past where the cave is and on around the bend of the river where the banks get flatter and flatter until they are a sort of marsh with the river flowing through the middle of it. I guess the road must be a quarter of a mile from the water along there. We must have driven four or five miles, and I know I’d never been so far along this road before. It was like seeing a new country, and we pretended we were explorers and had to keep a lookout for savages and wild animals and such things. Mark was great for that kind of games; and, for a fact, when you got interested in them they were a lot of fun. You could come pretty close to imagining the things really were happening that you were imagining were happening.

“There’s a house,” said Mark, pointing. “Looks like the chief lived there. Maybe we can make friends with him; or maybe there’s gold piled up there that we can g-git away with.”

“There’ll be guards hangin’ around with bows and arrers and spears,” Plunk objected. “They’ll up and stick us full of holes before we can wink.”

“Seems like I hear one of them savage war-drums a-beatin’,” says Binney. “Maybe he’s gatherin’ together his army to make an ambush for us.”

“We better go cautious. Tallow, you sneak ahead like a scout to see we don’t run into no trap.”

I got out and went slinking along by the side of the road, keeping hidden as much as I could in the bushes. After a minute I passed an orchard and came to an evergreen hedge. I poked up my head, cautious-like, and looked over. I never saw a yard with so many evergreens in it, all trimmed in funny shapes and sticking up everywhere. They were so close together you couldn’t see anything of the house but the roof. I watched quite a spell, but I couldn’t see anybody moving, so I sneaked back and reported that we weren’t being watched.

Mark called a council of war, and we decided to go ahead in a body, the real object being to get a drink of water, but we made believe we were after the chief’s gold. Just like Indians we wormed and squirmed along to the hedge and poked our way through where a bush had died out. It was a close squeeze for Mark, and he got scratched up considerable, but he got through just the same. Right off we began prowling around among all those evergreens, getting closer and closer to the house. We were all so interested in the game we clean forgot about the water and everything else.

At last we were crouching behind two bushes not more than ten feet from the steps. Mark raised his hand and pointed around one side of the house, motioning for Plunk and Binney to reconnoiter that way while he and I would go the other way. At that we rushed sudden from our cover to the corners of the house and went spying around, peeking in the windows, looking for savages or signs of the gold. At one window in the wing Mark stopped and looked careful. He waited for me to come along and pointed. I peeked in and saw that the room was all fixed up for somebody to do mechanical drawing. There were the same kind of tables and drawing boards and instruments the engineer had who built the city waterworks in Wicksville. But everything was new, you could see that, and hadn’t ever been used.

“Funny thing to be in a chief’s wigwam,” I whispered, and he nodded. He sat down with his back against the foundation and with his chin in his hands, the way he always does when he wants to figure out something he doesn’t understand. I could see he was puzzled about the drawing things way out there in that farmhouse, and if I left him alone he’d sit there maybe an hour trying to fit sort of an answer to it.

“Come on,” I whispered. “No tellin’ when these savages’ll come rampagin’ back. Let’s git out of this.”

So he came along until we met Binney and Plunk. They hadn’t seen a sign of life, and it was pretty clear the chief was off on some sort of expedition; but we were worried because there wasn’t even a little lump of gold to be seen through any of the windows—not a smidgin!

“Maybe he’s got a secret hidin’-place.”

“Prob’ly with some horrible image a-stand-in’ guard over it,” Binney said, and shivered like he was a little chilly. “They always have them awful-lookin’ images with grinnin’ mouths and maybe seventeen arms and legs a-guardin’ their secret and sacred places.” He’d got so interested that he could almost see a whopping big carving of some scary thing standing right there in front of him.

“Most likely we’ll have to find a hidden spring to touch. There’ll be a huge stone stuck against the openin’.”

I was getting tired of talking about it so much, so I up and said: “Well, let’s git to lookin’ for the place. We can study how to bust into it when we find where it is.”

We started off toward the back of the yard, when all at once Mark halted us and pointed off to the left. “Th-there it is!” he hissed. “The cave! Up that precipice! See the openin’?”

We looked and, sure enough, we saw what Mark meant. It was the icehouse with a little square opening up near the very top and a ladder nailed to the wall running up to it.

“It ain’t guarded,” says Binney, his mouth open like he was surprised most to death.

“How in the world did they ever come to neglect that?”

“The guard’s there,” Mark says, contemptuous-like. “Don’t you see him a-stand-in’, leanin’ on his spear? We got to hide around the corner and git him before he gives the a-a-alarm.”

We hid and waited for the guard to come along, and then we pounced out on him, and I guess he’d have been a pretty surprised guard if there’d been one at all. We knocked him down, and Mark sat on him and held his mouth shut while the rest of us tied him up tight. When he was taken care of Mark says, “Now for the treasure!” and commenced climbing up the ladder.

We all followed and scrambled through the little door in on top of the sawdust that the ice was packed in to keep it from melting during the summer. It was almost dark in there, and just like a great cavern.

“It’s g-g-gold!” shouts Mark, picking up a handful of sawdust and letting it run through his fingers. “Millions and millions of dollars worth of it. We’re rich men.” He said it just like some fellers we read about in a story of hidden treasure did. When they found theirs they got all excited and said lots of things like that, and Mark was always for doing things the way the books said.

I crawled over to the door to look down the precipice and see if our guard was still tied up all right, and I tell you I jerked in my head quick, for there was a man standing right at the foot of the ladder looking up, and he had the biggest dog with him I ever saw.

“Fellers,” I whispered, and I was scared, all right, “the guard’s got loose, and he’s waitin’ for us to come down with a trained lion to help him.”

They thought I was still playing, and partly I was, but the man was there, all right, as they saw when they looked. Pretty soon we knew he’d seen us, for he hollered, and his voice sounded old and mean and squeaky. “I got ye, all right, consarn ye. Come sneakin’ and spyin’ around a feller’s house, will you? I’ll learn ye what’s what ’fore I git shut of ye.” He waited a minute, then he spoke to the dog. “Watch, Obed, watch!” I thought that was a funny name for a dog. “Git ’em if they come down.” And then he went off leaving that whopper of a dog sitting right under us where he could gobble us if we came down.

“FELLERS, THE GUARD’S GOT LOOSE, AND HE’S WAITIN’ FOR US TO COME DOWN”

“Well!” says Plunk, like somebody had poked him between wind and water. “Well!”

We all crowded to the little door and looked down at the dog. He was lying with his muzzle between his paws, and it looked like he was all ready to go to sleep.

“Don’t look like he amounted to much as a watcher,” said Binney. “I bet we could walk right past him.”

“Wait till he’s fast asleep and try,” Mark said, and kind of grinned.

We waited maybe fifteen minutes, and I can tell you it was beginning to get pretty chilly in there with all that ice and gold that had gone and turned back into damp sawdust. We were getting more game than we had figured on.

“Don’t see what the man was so—riled about,” Plunk grumbled. “We hadn’t done nothing to him.”

“Thought we come to coon somethin’, I guess,” I told him; and that seemed likely, but when we got all through with the man and the house we knew that wasn’t the reason at all.

“I’m a-goin’ to try,” says Binney, and he shoved his legs through the door and begins crawling down the ladder. He was about halfway down when the dog grunted and cocked his ears and sat up on his haunches and looked at Binney with his big eyes. Then he yawned, and we could see right down into his red throat, and every tooth in his head stared at us and we stared at them. Binney began to climb back again, and never said a word when he was through the door and sitting on the sawdust once more.

“Better watch-dog than you c-c-calc’lated,” says Mark, slyly-like, with his face as sober as Deacon Barns’s when he asks for offerings for the heathen.

Nobody thought of anything to say, and we kept getting chillier and chillier and uncomfortabler and uncomfortabler. Binney was uneasiest of all, because there was his father’s horse and rig standing by the side of the road, and no telling when somebody’d come along and borrow it, or something would come along and scare the creature till he ran off. It was a nice pickle to be in, any way you looked at it, and when the way you looked was toward that dog it was prettier than ever.

“We got to git out,” I said.

“S-s-sure,” Mark chattered. “Show us how and we’ll come right along.”

But that wasn’t so easy. It began to look as though we would have to stay and take our medicine—whatever medicine the mean-looking, wizened-up old man intended to give us a dose of.

CHAPTER X

Mark crawled over to the little door and peered around. He pushed both his fat legs through and sat with his feet dangling, and I saw him begin to pinch his cheek between his thumb and finger.

“There,” I says to the other fellows. “He’s got to work now. Just you wait, and Marcus Aurelius Fortunatus Tidd’ll fix up some sort of scheme to make that dog wish he was off in the woods barkin’ at a woodchuck.”

Pretty soon Mark began to drag in his legs, which was considerable of a job, and his little eyes were twinkling, though the rest of his face was solemn and without any more expression than a round apple dumpling, which it looked like a whole lot.

“Fellers,” he says, “have you got a slingshot among you?”

Both Binney Jenks and I had, and good full pockets of bully round stones, too.

“Good,” says Mark. “We’ll give Mister Man a s-s-seance.”

“A what?”

“A s-seance—that’s a sort of ghost party, where spooks go prancin’ around. Wonder if he’s s-superstitious.”

“He looked like he was right mean, if that’s any help,” says Plunk.

“Where you goin’ to git your ghosts?” I was curious to find out.

“These here’ll be sling-shot ghosts.”

“G’wan!” I sneered; but I was pretty sure he’d hit on some scheme better than ordinary.

“What’s the scary part to the ghost stories you know?” he asks.

I thought it over, remembering all the hair-raising stories I ever heard—sort of telling them over to myself to see what was the part that made them creepy. Well, sir, you’d be surprised, but it was the same thing in every one of them—noises. That was it—noises—mysterious noises that you couldn’t see any reason for. It didn’t matter what the noise was, just so there wasn’t anything around to make it. It could be a door squeaking or a chair moving or a footstep or a cat miauing or anything. I told Mark.

He nodded three times. “Sure—noises. Well, we’re goin’ to give this feller noises—mysterious noises.”

“How?”

“Sling-shots. See that dinner-bell?” He pointed to an old dinner-bell hanging on the pole back of the house.

We could see it, all right, but we couldn’t see what good it was going to do.

“Can you h-hit it with your sling-shot?”

I took a good stone and fitted it in the leather, then I knelt close to the door and took aim careful as I could. They waited, holding their breaths until I let go the rubbers, and in a second the old bell said glang just as plain as if somebody had rung it. Mark grinned until all the fat on his face looked as if it was trying to climb back of his ears. “Fine,” he says; “now keep away from the door.”

“Why?”

“So he won’t see us and think we done it. It’s got to be mysterious, ain’t it?”

We got a little back from the door, and I shot again, but this time I missed. Binney took a try at it, and glang went the old bell.

“Wait,” said Mark.

Pretty soon we saw the old man come poking out of the house and look around. He walked back to the bell and looked up at it and turned all around, watching everywhere, but of course there wasn’t a thing to be seen. When his back was to the bell Mark said to shoot again. I let her go, and glang went the bell. The old man jumped like I’d shot him instead of the bell, and looked up at it with his eyes sticking out big as eggs. I’ll bet it was a mighty mysterious happening to him.

“N-now,” says Mark, “shoot the d-dog.”

I scrouged close to the door and let the old whopper have one in the ribs. He jumped worse than the old man did when the bell rang and said “Yip, yip!”

Well, there was another noise for him. He came walking our way cautious, and he was as pale as a pond-lily. When he was about half-way I let fly at the bell again, and when it glanged I thought he was going to throw a fit. He wheeled around to look that way, and Binney reached out quick and gave the dog another. He yowled again, and around came the old man, but there wasn’t a thing to see. We could sit back where he couldn’t see us and plug away at his bell all day. We rang it twice, one glang right after another. If I’d been that fellow I calculate I’d most have jumped out of my skin, just as he did. What with the bell a-ringing without anybody to ring it, and the dog a-yelping without anybody to make him yelp, it was spooky enough to suit anybody, and a lot more than enough to suit him. You could see he wished there was five or six other men with him, or that he was off in the next state.

“Hey, up there!” he yelled, with his voice trembling and squeaky. “Hey!”

We never said a word; just kept as still as though we weren’t there at all; and I guess that helped. It always is sort of creepy to call somebody you’re sure is right there and not hear a sound. You get to wondering what’s happened to them, and—well, you know that kind of cold and wrinkly feeling you get just at the back of your neck. And to top it off we gave the old bell another lick. He turned and made tracks for the house.

Well, we weren’t helped much so far. “Give it to the dog,” says Mark; and we did, twice, good and hard. He set up an awful yelping and the man began to run, but he stopped and began whistling and calling. The dog went running after him, pretty glad to get away, I guess. I had it figured out the old man wanted some kind of company and wanted it bad, so he’d rather have the dog with him than watching us. He went hustling up to the back door, and just as he opened it Binney whanged the bell again. Well, Mister Man just waited to let in his dog and slammed the door shut so hard he ’most broke its window; and on top of everything I banged a stone right against the panel. I’ll bet he thought the ghost was rapping for him sure.

“He don’t come out again for a week,” says Plunk; and it did look as though he’d holed himself in for quite a stay.

“Guess we can git down now,” says Mark.

We climbed down the ladder cautious and sneaked out through the evergreens and behind the hedge, keeping out of sight of the house till we got to the road. Nobody made a move after us.

“Wonder who lives here?” Mark was always curious.

“Look on the mail-box,” I told him; “the name’ll be there.”

He crawled along to the little tin box on the post in front of the gate. The name was Harvey Willis. None of us thought anything of that then, but it wasn’t very long before Mark did think something of it by putting two and two together. He was great for doing that. Give him a couple of facts, and he was the greatest fellow that ever was for taking them and reasoning all sorts of other facts out of them. I never saw his beat.

Binney’s old horse was standing just where we left him, and I thought he looked kind of disappointed to see us come back. Most probably he’d been having a horse-dream about standing right there in the shade forever with lots of fresh green grass to eat and no work to do. Seeing us, and Mark Tidd in special, must have been quite a shock to him. I’d sort of hate to have to pull Mark around myself.

We got into the rig and started for home, stirred up quite a bit and excited over our adventure. It was Mark that began showing us his pockets full of sawdust. Said he’d had presence of mind enough to get a cargo of gold even when we was being besieged and fighting for our lives against awful odds. The rest of us were sorry we hadn’t got some treasure, too.

“The old Ku Klux Klan showed it was worth somethin’ that time,” says Binney; and we all agreed with him.

Mark told us about a lot of famous escapes out of history, and we sized them up and compared them with ours; and if we hadn’t been about as smart as any of them, then I don’t know what I’m talking about! Ours was as good a scheme as any Mark had to tell about.

We drove along, making believe we were pursued and that the horse was galloping madly, which was a kind of a joke, because that animal couldn’t have gone fast enough to break the law on the sign over the bridge about riding or driving across faster than a walk. We stood ready with our sling-shots to sell our lives dear, and, considering everything, we were having as much fun as I’ve had for a long time.

We kept looking along the river-bank hoping to catch sight of Sammy, but he must have gone farther up, because we didn’t see any trace of him. There was no telling how far he had gone; ten or fifteen miles wasn’t anything to him at all, and sometimes he’d be away as much as a week. When he came back he’d tell us about hunting or fishing in a lake or woods maybe fifty miles off. I never saw his beat for walking—all day and all night he could keep it up without getting tired, and as for getting lost or wondering which was the right way to go, why, it never bothered him at all. He was like one of those pigeons that carry letters; take him where you wanted to and he always knew the way to start for home.

Maybe we had gone a mile when we saw a cloud of dust ahead that had a horse and buggy in the middle of it driving faster than farmers usually do when they’re coming home from town. At first we thought maybe it was the doctor on a hurry call but the horse wasn’t gray, so we knew it couldn’t be him. In a few minutes the rig was close enough so we could see the man driving, and I like to have fallen out of our carriage, for it was nobody in the world but that Henry C. Batten who was sneaking around the engine-room the day before. There he was, as big as life, and we thought sure he had gone back to Pittsburg. He went by in a flash without even looking at us.

“Well,” I said to Mark, “what d’you think of that?”

“I think,” said Mark, frowning a little, “that we’re goin’ to have to keep our eyes open. If that feller’s hangin’ around after dad’s turbine, now’s when he’ll try to git it—with dad away.”

“Jinks!” he says in a minute, slapping his knee. “That name on that post-box was Willis. He’s drivin’ that way. The engineer’s name was Willis—in Mr. Whiteley’s place, I mean—and he’s in cahoots with this Batten. Fellers, he’s a goin’ to that place we just left.”

It sounded likely, the way Mark reasoned it out.

“Well,” says Plunk, “what are we goin’ to do about it?”

“Nothin’,” Mark says, “but wait and keep our eyes open.”

It was a pretty serious business, we thought, with Mr. Tidd away and nobody to depend on but just the Ku Klux Klan. Still, considering what we had done off and on, we believed we were pretty well able to look after things in a pinch.

We hurried up Binney’s horse and got home in plenty of time for supper. In the evening I went over to Mark’s, and we put in the time putting a brand-new padlock on the shed where the turbine and the drawings and things were. That made us feel safer. So when it got too dark to play around outside we went in and fussed with a lot of stuff Mark had and looked at books. Along about half-past eight Mrs. Tidd brought in a big plate with fried cakes and apples and hunks of maple sugar on it, and we attended to that the way it ought to be attended to. Afterward I went home.

I went to bed and fell asleep right off. I got to dreaming, and it seemed like somebody was whistling the Ku Klux Klan whistle to me and I was tied up so I couldn’t come or even speak—one of those funny kind of dreams when you feel as though you couldn’t even wink, and yet can’t figure out what it is keeps you so still. And all through it I kept hearing the whistle and straining and trying to get up, but it wasn’t any use. After a while it seemed as if somebody was trying to blow me up with dynamite or something. There came an awful crash in the dream, and I woke up standing in the middle of the floor. I was shivering and scared so my teeth chattered. Then I heard the Ku Klux Klan whistle again, and something came smack against my window. I guess that was the explosion I heard in my dream. I stuck my head out and there stood Mark Tidd, looking as big as all get out, with the moon shining down onto him as white as silver.

“What’s the matter?” I called to him.

“Q-q-quick!” he says. “Come down. Somebody’s busted into the shed and s-s-stole dad’s t-t-turbine.” He was so excited he stuttered like anything.

“G’wan!” I says.

“It’s gone,” says he.

“What time is it?”

“’Most one.”

Well, it was the first time I ever did it. I didn’t like to go sneaking off without telling my folks, but I judged the circumstances kind of demanded something special, so I got into my clothes and slid out on the porch. It wasn’t any trick to get down the trellis to the ground. It was cold, and my teeth chattered.

“What we goin’ to do now?” I asked.

He didn’t say a word, but just set off walking away into the dark, and I followed after.

CHAPTER XI

One o’clock in the morning is a creepy time, even if the moon is shining, and it’s a good sight more creepy when you know something has happened. I hurried up to walk beside Mark because it was lonesome behind. He was heading straight for his house.

“Is it gone?” I asked. “Are you sure?”

“The padlock’s pried off, and the turbine ain’t in the shed.”

“How’d you come to find out about it at this time of night?”

“They waked me up. I ran to the window just in time to see ’em drive off l-l-licketty split. Then I went down, and the turbine was gone.”

“And then you came after me.” I was kind of tickled to think he did that. It showed he depended on me like and thought I’d stick by him and help out. “Did you see who it was?”

“No.”

“Which way did they drive?”

He jerked his thumb down the street. “No tellin’ which way they went. Prob’ly turned the corner; I don’t know which way.”

He went around through his yard to the workshop, and, sure enough, the padlocks had been pried off and Mr. Tidd’s engine was gone. I didn’t quite realize it till then, and I tell you it struck me all in a heap. There was Mr. Tidd off in Detroit, seeing about his patent and confident of getting rich, and here we were, left to look after the engine, and we’d let it get away from us.

“Maybe he can get his patent anyhow,” I said; but there wasn’t much comfort in that, for Mark explained that it couldn’t be done. His father had to have a model that would work, or no patent would be given to him. He was sure that Henry C. Batten was at the bottom of it all, and so was I.

“What they’re goin’ to do,” he said, “is to take dad’s turbine and make drawin’s from it. They’ll git another model made and smouge the patent before we kin b-begin to put a new one together.”

“They won’t dare take it to the depot and send it on the train,” I told him.

“Not from here. Maybe they’ll drive to some town near by and p-put it in a box and send it that way.”

“Maybe,” I says; but somehow I didn’t think so. Neither did Mark, I guess.

“Let’s see if we kin follow the wagon tracks,” he said, and got a lantern out of the shop.

It wouldn’t be so hard to do at that time of the night, because there weren’t any other wagons driving around, and the wheels of this one would be the last wherever it went. Besides, it had rained a little earlier in the night, and the dust in the roads was pasty.

We followed the tracks down the alley a couple of blocks; then they turned, and Mark muttered that he thought so.

“Thought what?” I said.

“That they’d turn this way—toward the river.”

“Why?”

“Because,” he said, “that’s where the Willis farm is.”

He told me as we walked along what he’d reasoned out. From the minute the turbine had been taken he began thinking and thinking the way he always does and putting two and two together. At last he got it into his head that he knew where the men were taking his father’s engine. First, there was Henry C. Batten driving on the road toward the Willis farm; second, Willis was the father to the engineer who had sneaked Batten in to see if the turbine worked; third, old Mr. Willis acted more skittish than ordinary when we came around, and, says Mark, that showed he had a guilty conscience; and last, and what Mark called the clincher of the whole thing, was that room in the farmhouse all fixed up with drawing-tools and tables just waiting for somebody to come in and set to work. I thought it over, and it looked to me as though he’d argued it out pretty straight.

“I guess,” I says, “the place to look for the engine is out at Willis’s.”

We followed the wagon tracks quite a ways farther just to make sure, and then turned back for home. It was beginning to get kind of pink in the east when I scrambled up to my room again and rolled into bed. I’d promised Mark to meet him early in the morning to see what we’d do.

I went over to his house right after breakfast, and he was at the gate waiting for me. “Careful what you say,” he told me. “Mother don’t know, and there ain’t no use frightenin’ her yet.”

“All right,” I says; “now what’s your scheme.”

“We can’t do nothin’ till we know where the turbine is and who t-t-took it. We think we know, but we got to make sure.”

“Let’s git at it, then,” I says. “What’ll we do—walk? It’s five miles.”

“I don’t want Binney and Plunk along—there’d be too many of us, and we might get caught, so we can’t git Binney’s horse.”

All of a sudden an idea hit me. The river ran right by the Willis house, and I owned a kind of a boat, flat-bottomed, but not very heavy. It was one of the kind that sort of skims over the top of the water without setting down into it much, and it was easy to row.

“What’s the matter with my boat?” I says.

“Say, that’s the very thing.”

“And I got two pairs of oars,” I told him, and most laughed out loud. Marcus Aurelius Fortunatus Tidd never cared much about exerting himself to speak of, and the idea of rowing a boat five or six miles wasn’t one he cottoned to worth a cent. He was sorry about the other pair of oars, and he showed it; but he didn’t say anything, and I knew he’d row the best he knew how when he got in the boat. If he had to work he’d work, and there wouldn’t be any soldiering. If he could get somebody else, by some scheme or other, to do his work for him he’d be tickled to death, but just to come out and loaf like some fellows do—well, he wouldn’t do it.

I kept my old boat above the dam tied up to a stake back of my uncle’s sawmill, and in ten minutes we had pushed her out into the river and were pulling up-stream, taking it easy so as not to tire ourselves all out at the start. It took us half an hour to get to Brigg’s Island. Above that the current got swifter, and we were quite a spell getting to the little island across from our cave. We went up the outside branch because the water was so shallow on our side, but we could see a little smoke going up from the place where the cave was, so we knew Sammy was home again. It’s lucky he was.

We rowed a little farther and then pushed in to the bank to rest a bit.

“We want to land a little this side of Willis’s,” Mark decided, “and s-s-sneak up same as we did the other day along the fence.”

“’Tain’t likely they’d hurt us.”

“I dunno. Never can tell when men are doin’ things like this. But I wasn’t figgerin’ on gittin’ hurt, only on bein’ seen. If they found somebody was s-s-spyin’ on ’em they’d up and s-s-scoot. Specially if Batten was to see me. I ain’t easy to forgit.” Mark grinned when he said that. He was right, though; Batten might not remember me if he did see me prowling around, and he might think I was just a kid playing some game or hunting or something; but if he caught sight of Mark, why, he’d know who it was in a minute and why he was there.

When we were rested up we got into my boat again and up the river we went. We rowed and rowed and rowed. “Thank goodness,” I said, “it won’t be such hard pullin’ comin’ back. We kin float down with the current.”

In about another hour we came to the island in the bend of the river, a quarter of a mile below Willis’s. Here the river ran through a big marsh that stretched, all green with tall water-grasses and cat-tails, on either side, and there wasn’t a good place to land. We didn’t want to have to wallow through the marsh, because we knew we’d get in mire up to our knees and maybe higher, and because it looked just like the kind of a place where rattlesnakes would be fussing around. In general, I’m not afraid of rattlesnakes, but I don’t like to go plunging through a place like that and maybe stepping right on one before he has a chance to rattle at you.

Back among the reeds and grasses we could see lots of muskrat houses, and we stowed that fact away to remember, because you can make pretty good money trapping rats and selling their skins; and I thought it would be a fine place for wild duck in the early spring.

We turned back a little to where the shore was more solid and found a place where a rail fence ran right down to the water. We made for that and tied the boat. It wasn’t much of a trick to clamber along the rails to shore, though Mark made them bend so I thought it wouldn’t be very surprising if they broke. That fence wasn’t built to hold fat boys, but to keep in cows.

There was a bank maybe ten feet high to climb before we got to the road. We looked up and down pretty careful before we got up in sight; but nobody was coming, so we ducked cross to the north side where there were a lot of hazel bushes growing along the roadside, and some blackberry bushes, as we discovered by the prickers when we pushed our way through them.

We were pretty cautious, keeping back in the bushes and ready to lie down out of sight if anybody came along, but nobody did, and so we got to the old orchard that was next to Willis’s house. It was a pretty big orchard, but it hadn’t been looked after very well, and the grass was high. The limbs of the trees came close to the ground, and, take it altogether, it made a pretty good place to sneak through if you didn’t want anybody to see you coming.

It was easy enough to get up to the rail fence that went down that side of Willis’s yard to the barn; and it was safe enough, for the fence corners were full of bushes and big weeds where we could have stayed as long as we wanted to without anybody seeing us. We didn’t come to hide in a fence corner, though.

“Well,” I says, “we’re here.”

“We’re on the wrong side of the house. What I want to do is get a p-p-peek into that room where the drawin’ things were.”

“We kin go around.”

“We got to,” says he.

“Hold on!” I says. “There ain’t no need for both of us to go trampin’ all over the place. One kin see as good as two, and if I am seen it won’t be so bad as if you were. You stay here, and I’ll go crawlin’ around and see if I can’t get a shot at that window. I bet I can get there all right.”

He thought a minute, sort of hesitating, because Mark wasn’t the kind of a fellow to let somebody run a risk he ought to run; but he saw it was the best scheme to let me go, so he nodded. “Maybe I’ll find somethin’ to do here,” he says. “Be careful.”

I went crouching along to the road, intending to go past the house under cover of the hedge that ran across in front of it. I was halfway across, I expect, before I thought of the dog. Now, I’ve found out that it is pretty easy to get around without a man seeing you; but it’s quite another thing to be so still a dog can’t hear you, and I never found anybody who could stop a good watch-dog from smelling him. But, dog or no dog, I had to look into that room, for, if Mark had guessed right, there’s where his father’s turbine would be, and nowhere else. The drawing-man would want it there to take his measurements from and to see how it went together.

I ducked past the gate as quick as I could, though there wasn’t really any need, for there were so many evergreen trees growing around in the yard that you couldn’t see the gate from the house, anyway. I’ve seen a lot of farmhouses with six or seven evergreens growing in their front yards for ornaments, but I never saw anybody who seemed to like them so well as Mr. Willis. There were more than a dozen of them, set in rows, and all trimmed and pruned into funny shapes like balls and cones and one thing and another. I was glad he did like them; it came in mighty handy for me.

There was a field of corn on the side of the house I was heading for, and it wasn’t very far up, not far enough to hide in; but there were quite a few clumps of bushes along the fence, like there always are on farms where the men that run them are shiftless. I got behind one of these and took a good look at everything to see how the land lay and to make up my mind just what to do so as to get a look through that window.

The house was about a hundred feet away, and between me and it was a fairly large maple tree. Back at my right, a little nearer the fence than the house, was the icehouse where we got caught the day before. From where I was I could see the dinner-bell that had helped us out. Back of that a little was the woodshed, and way at the far corner of the lot was the barn and the corn-crib. There was smoke coming out of the kitchen chimney, but nobody was out in the yard or anywhere in sight.

I figured it out that the thing for me to do would be to run across the yard as fast as I could, look in the window and dash back again over the fence. If I was quick enough nobody’d see me, and it wouldn’t give the dog a chance to smell me either. So I threw my leg over the top rail and let myself down inside. Then I sprinted toward the big tree which was between me and the window I wanted to look into. I wasn’t more than halfway to the tree before I heard the front door open, and somebody came out on the porch. I couldn’t see them yet, but I daren’t take any chances of their coming around into the side yard where I was. I just jumped for the tree and grabbed the lower limb. It didn’t take me a second to swing myself up among the branches, and the leaves were so thick that I knew I was safe if that dog didn’t come nosing around.

I felt in my pocket for my sling-shot, thinking maybe if the dog did come I could fix it so he wouldn’t want to stay where I was very bad. By luck the sling-shot was there and a couple of dozen good pebbles. I tell you I was pretty thankful.

It was lucky I went up the tree, for I heard steps coming toward my end of the front porch, and then there stood Henry C. Batten in his shirt-sleeves, smoking a big cigar.

He stepped down off the porch and whistled. I didn’t like that whistle a bit, because it meant I’d have the dog sniffing around that part of the place, and I’d much rather he’d stay where he was. But he came galloping up from the barn, and Henry C. Batten stood there and patted his head and scratched his back. Then he picked up a stick and threw it right my way for the dog to fetch. Over he came, licketty split, but I guess he was so busy with his game that he didn’t notice me. The man kept him running back and forth quite a while till he got tired of it; then he and the dog began to stroll around the yard. They walked all around until they came to my tree, and then what did Henry C. Batten do but sit right down on the grass in the shade and light another cigar, as if he was going to stay there the rest of the afternoon.

I would have given my jack-knife to have been anywhere else but right there. The leaves were good and thick, and the chances were against Batten seeing me, but, all the same, he might see me, or the dog might smell me, and then where would I be?

I kept pretty still, you can bet, and held my breath so that wouldn’t make any sound. It was all right for a little while, but just you sit all doubled up in the crotch of a tree without moving even a finger and see how long you like it. I got a cramp in my leg, and my back ached, and my arms got tired. I never was so uncomfortable in my life. The cramp in my leg kept getting worse and worse, and there isn’t anything I know of that hurts so much as a good big cramp just above the knee. I thought I’d have to holler right out. Finally I couldn’t stand it any more. I had to straighten out that leg and get rid of the cramp—that was all there was to it, I had to. So I did. It made a little rustle in the leaves, and my heart came up in my mouth so I could have bit it. Henry C. Batten looked up, but, thank goodness, he couldn’t see me. The dog looked up, too, and began to walk around the tree and sniff. It was just what I had been afraid of all the time. Then he began to bark.

“What’s up there, old fellow?” Henry C. Batten says. “Is it a bird?”

The dog kept on barking. Batten got up and looked around for a stick. When he found one he stepped off a piece and threw it up into the tree, and out flew a big bird with a lot of fuss and flutter. I never was so much obliged to a bird in my life.

“There he goes,” says Batten to the dog; and then he walked off toward the house again. But the dog kept on hanging around my tree. Batten turned and whistled to him, and after a couple of times he went along, but even then he kept looking back and growling. It’s a wonder Batten didn’t suspect something.

I watched them turn out into the road and walk down past the orchard.

“Well,” I said to myself, “it’s now or never.” So I dropped down out of the tree and ran to the house. I could see in the window by getting on tiptoe, and I didn’t lose a second doing it. There was the room, drawing-tables and tools and all, and right in the middle of the floor was what I came to discover—there stood the Tidd turbine!

I didn’t wait a jiffy more than necessary, and anybody that had tried to race me back to the fence would have had to go pretty fast to come in even second. I don’t know how I got over—half fell and half jumped, I guess—but, anyhow, I got over, and there I was safe and sound, but shaking all over as if I had a chill.

It took me maybe twenty minutes to get back to where Mark Tidd was waiting. He was sitting with his back against the fence and an old piece of paper spread on his knee, drawing something.

“Well,” I says, “here I am—and it’s there.”

He seemed pleased like to think he’d been right in all his surmises, and nodded.

“What you doin’?” I asked.

“Makin’ a map,” says he. “I’ve been prowlin’ around, and here’s the lay of the land. It’ll be a handy thing when we come to p-p-plannin’ how to git the engine away.”

“Which,” says I, “don’t look like sich an easy job as some I’ve heard of.”

He stuffed his map in his pocket, and when we saw Henry C. Batten and the dog come back from their walk we hustled down to our boat and rowed home. It was late in the afternoon when we got there and I was most starved—I’d hate to have had to feed Mark—for we hadn’t had anything since breakfast.

That night Mark drew out his map all in ink, showing everything, and you’ll find it here if you’re interested in the lay of the land around the Willis farm.

CHAPTER XII

It’s lucky the schools had been closed for two weeks on account of a diphtheria scare, for it’s hard to see how we could have got along if it hadn’t been that way. We had a whole week before us yet, and if we couldn’t get back Mr. Tidd’s turbine in seven days we couldn’t get it back at all. But we didn’t lose any time just because we had a little of it on hand. Mark Tidd was no time-loser.

Next morning he got me out of bed ’most as early as if it was the Fourth of July, and lugged me off down to my boat.

“We hain’t a-goin’ to row all the way up there again, I hope,” I says, because there were blisters on my hands, and my back was stiff, and, anyhow, rowing ten miles or so is a joke I don’t like to have played on me every day hand-running.

“We’ll just row as far as the c-c-cave,” Mark says. “Then we’ll git Sammy to row the rest of the way.”

“Oh,” says I, “Sammy. What good’ll Sammy be, I’d like to know. Might as well fetch along the Perkinses’ Jersey calf.”

“Sammy kin lift,” says Mark. “How’d you figger we was goin’ to git the turbine out of the house? Whistle to it and have it follow us like a d-d-dog?”

I didn’t have anything more to say. I might have known he wouldn’t take Sammy without some good reason.

“It’s quite a heft even for Sammy,” I told him.

“He’s got to carry it.”

We rowed up the river again and landed near the cave. Sammy was there, all right, because his fire was smoldering, so we climbed up the hill and hollered at him. He came sticking his big head out of the opening and grinned at us like he was tickled to death to see us, which most likely he was, and says, “Nice fish—bass. So big. Sammy fry in pan, quick. Sammy good cook.”

“We ain’t got time to eat to-day, Sammy,” I told him; and he looked as disappointed as a baby that didn’t get the candy somebody promised it.

“We got to go up the river in my boat,” I says, quick, “and we want you to come along.”

He grinned again, and all his teeth showed as white as polished pebbles. “Catch fish, maybe, eh? Good boys, big friends to poor Sammy. Sammy show where to catch fish—big fish.”

“Not to catch fish this time. You tell him, Mark.”

“We want you to help us, Sammy. Some men have taken father’s engine, and we got to git it back. They’re b-b-bad men, Sammy, and they might hurt us. And there’s a dog.”

He grinned wider than ever. “Sammy take dog—so.” He showed us with his big hands how he’d grab the dog and throw it far enough to bust its neck—and I bet he could have done it, too. “Bad men take engine, eh? Um! Sammy git it back. No ’fraid of bad men. Sammy big, very big. Bad men afraid of Sammy, eh? Sammy scare bad men so they keel over flipflop.”

I thought likely Batten might keel over flipflop if he met Sammy on a dark night, and somehow it made me feel better about the whole thing. Sammy was big. Why, it would have taken all of Batten and Willis and half of the dog to make another like him—and then Sammy could have licked the fellow they went to make up.

“Got boat?” he asked.

We pointed down to the river, and he nodded. “Sammy git ready. Fetch pan to cook, and fish-lines. Maybe stay long, eh? Maybe git hungry. Good boys feed Sammy—now Sammy feed good boys—maybe, eh?”

He put a couple of pans and a bundle of other stuff into the boat, and then without our hinting at it at all he took the oars; and the way he sent that boat skimming up-stream made me ashamed of the way Mark and I had gone the day before. He seemed to take it easy, too, like it wasn’t work at all, but play.

We got to the little island—maybe there was a couple of acres in it, all told—and Sammy stopped rowing a minute. “Bad,” he said, pointing to it and scowling. “Very bad little island. Boys keep off—always. Don’t never go on island.”

“What’s the matter with it?” I wanted to know.

“Snakes, big snakes! Lay in deep grass and go k-r-r-r-r-r with tails.” He imitated a rattler so I ’most jumped out of the boat. It sounded as if one was right there under my legs all ready to strike.

“Oh, rattlesnakes.”

He nodded two or three times. “Heaps, many. Bad place. And snakes not all—poison ivy. Boys, stay away.”

“You bet we will,” says Mark.

The island didn’t look like much of a place to land, anyhow, snakes or no snakes. It was low, with more bushes than trees on it, though there were quite a few butternuts and some whopping willows. It looked marshy and soggy, and I calculated we could get our feet wet most anywhere except, perhaps, right in the middle, where the butternuts were thickest.

Mark showed Sammy where to land over by the old rail fence, and when we got ashore Mark drew out his map that he’d made the night before and showed it to us. Sammy looked at it with his eyes bulging out like blue robin’s eggs—only bigger.

“Fat boy make map, eh? He make river, house, barn, trees?”

Mark admitted it, and it didn’t take half an eye to see he was pretty proud of his work. Sam patted him on the back and grinned like he thought the map was wonderful and Mark was wonderful, too, and that didn’t make Marcus Aurelius Fortunatus Tidd feel small or mean. He never minded being admired a bit.

“It’s a good map, all right,” I says, impatient-like, because it wasn’t any fun squatting down there in the muck, “but how’s it going to help us git back the engine?”

“Tallow,” says Mark, looking at me like he was sorry to see such ignorance in anybody, “we got to have a map. How we goin’ to plan our campaign without? Tell me that. This is like a battle,” says he, “and battles is planned out ahead with m-m-maps.”

“Maybe so,” says I, “but if I was general of this army I’d be stirrin’ around Willis’s, I would. I guess I know the way around there pretty well without any map.”

“Well,” he says, disgusted as could be, “come on, then.”

He folded the map and stuffed it in his pocket. I started to climb the bank first and was half-way up before Mark or Sammy were on their feet at all. I wasn’t cautious about it like I ought to have been, and went sticking my head right up in sight without ever spying around to see if everything was safe and clear. It served me right. I stuck my head over the top of the bank, and was hauling the rest of my body after, when I looked up, and there, looking at me kind of surprised, stood Henry C. Batten.

“Well,” says he, “where’d you come from?”

I was struck all in a heap, but I knew I had to do something to keep Mark and Sammy from popping into sight and to keep Batten from walking over to look down where they were. I reckon I looked scared. But I took hold of myself and sort of whispered in my own ear that now was the time to do some quick thinking and quick acting. I grinned at Batten. It’s always a good plan to grin when you can’t think of anything else. Folks like to be grinned at. I grinned like I was tickled to death to see him, and says, “Have you heard any frogs a-hollering around here?”

I didn’t wait for him to answer, but jumped up in the road and walked across to him. I didn’t want him coming over to me and looking down the bank.

“Frogs,” says he, “I should say I had heard some. That marsh is alive with ’em.”

“I ain’t been able to git near one in a mile,” says I. “I kin git a nickel a dozen for them down to the hotel.”

“How d’you get ’em?” he wanted to know.

“Whallop ’em with a club. I got to git a new one, too. A longer one with a knob on the end of it. Guess I can cut one off ’n that hick’ry yonder.”

There was a big hickory about a hundred feet off, and I started for it, and of course he came following along. It’s a funny thing, but folks always will follow like that. Just meet a man or a boy or a woman and point to something and say you’re going to do something or other to it, and he’ll come mogging along as interested as if you were a balloon ascension.

“Gimme a boost up,” I says.

He helped me and I got hold of the lower limb and was up in a minute. It was a smooth-bark hickory, and good clubs were growing all over it. It was a regular club tree. I got out my knife and began sawing away at a limb. It was hard cutting, but I got it off pretty soon and dropped it down on the ground. I came down after it, and trimmed it up, talking to Henry C. Batten all the time.

“Summer boarder?” I asked him, looking at his clothes.

He grinned. “Well, something like that,” he admitted. “I guess, seeing the time of year it is, that I’m a spring boarder.”

I laughed fit to split. There ain’t a better way of getting on the blind side of a man than to ’most laugh yourself sick when he makes a joke. I did my duty nobly, if I do say it myself, and it wasn’t much of a joke to laugh at, either.

“Who you spring-boardin’ with?” I snickered; and then I made a sort of joke of my own. “That sounds like you was stoppin’ at a swimmin’-hole, don’t it? Spring-boardin’?”

He laughed, and after that I wasn’t worrying much. If ever you get in a tight place with a man just laugh at something funny he says and make him laugh at something funny you say, and the worry’s over. Somehow you can’t get to suspecting a fellow you’ve been laughing with.

“Where d’you live?” he asked me.

I jerked my thumb over my shoulder. “Back there a piece,” I said, which was true, all right. But it was quite a piece—five miles or more.

When I was done trimming my frog club I shut my jack-knife and, when Batten wasn’t looking, dropped it on the ground near the tree where I knew I could find it again. Then we started to walk up the road toward Willis’s.

We walked along quite a ways until we’d got so far I judged Mark and Sammy would have had time to get well out of sight. Then I began feeling around in my pockets and looked worried. “I dropped my jack-knife somewheres,” I told him. “I bet it was under that tree.”

I felt through my pockets some more, but of course it wasn’t there. “I’m goin’ back,” I says. “That was a new knife, and I can’t afford to lose it.”

“No, I s’pose not,” he says. “Well, good-by. If you get any frogs bring ’em to me at the next house. I’ll pay you ten cents a dozen for good ones.”

I didn’t wait, but started running back as if I was anxious about my knife. I was anxious, all right, but the knife hadn’t anything to do with it. By the time I got to the tree Batten was out of sight around the bend of the road, so I went right to the bank and looked over. Mark and Sammy were gone. I whistled the Ku Klux Klan whistle, and got an answer from out toward the river where Sammy and Mark had pulled the boat and hidden it in the reeds. As soon as they saw me they knew it was safe, and came pulling in to the rail fence again.

“Whe-e-ew!” I called, “but that was a close shave.”

Mark didn’t answer anything, but after he and Sammy were up in the road he said, “I been thinkin’, and what we got to do f-f-first is git rid of the dog.”

“It would be a good thing to do, all right, but he don’t look to me like an easy dog to git rid of.”

“You wait,” says Mark, and winked at Sammy. The big fellow grinned and pulled a whopping bass out from behind him.

“Maybe dog like fish, eh? Maybe he come to git fish. Then Sammy catch him, so. Dogs like Sammy—never hurt Sammy.”

“Maybe,” I said; “but this don’t look like a friendly dog.”

Sammy only grinned.

We sneaked up toward Willis’s through the bushes and hid in the orchard like we did before. There wasn’t anything to do but wait, so we waited. The dog wasn’t in sight anywhere. We sat there maybe an hour, when Mister Dog came stretching and yawning out of the barn and walked through the yard to the front gate. Sammy, still grinning all over his great, round face, crept on all fours along the rail fence and got out in the road. We stayed where we were because we couldn’t help any that we could see, and, anyhow, the idea of fooling with that dog didn’t hold out any inducements. I got a grip on my club and made up my mind that if he did sail into Sammy I’d help all I could; but, thank goodness, it wasn’t necessary. In no time at all we saw Sammy, with a rope around the dog’s neck, waiting for us at the fence.

“Nice dog,” says he, when we came up. “Like fish very much. Give him lots of fish, maybe, eh? Now what we do?”

“We’ll tie him up,” says Mark. “Lead him down the road far enough so he can’t be heard barkin’.”

We marched him a quarter of a mile off and tied him a rod or so back from the road in the woods.

“There,” I told him, and gave him a pat on the head, “I feel better with you here. You’re a weight off my mind, and no mistake.”

“Now,” says Mark, “we’ll git down to business.”

He had things planned out, all but the getting of the turbine. It looked to me like that was the important thing, but it didn’t seem to bother him very much—sort of took it for granted we’d get it out of the house, all right, but he was worried about how we’d get away to Wicksville with it and without getting caught. He said the first thing to do was to take my boat up the river to Willis’s and run it up through the marsh. I guess somebody there liked to fish or row or something, for they had dug out a sort of canal from the river through the marshy ground and right up to the solid bank. There was a flight of rickety steps leading up the bank, and at the bottom was a little square landing-place. What we had to do, Mark said, was to get the boat to that landing, or near enough to reach, and keep it there without letting anybody see it till Sammy came down the steps with the engine in his arms.

It sounded easy enough to get the boat there and hide it, but I couldn’t see, for the life of me, how we were going to get into the house and haul out a big machine without having somebody catch on.

“It’s always the hardest part,” says Mark, “that’s easiest done. It’s because you try harder. The great schemes that have failed did it because somebody got m-m-mixed on a little thing.” And he told us a lot of instances out of history and stories. It looked like he had the best of the argument, but that didn’t get the engine into the boat.

CHAPTER XIII

We waited until we thought everybody in the house would be eating dinner, and then we rowed up the shore and turned into the Willis’s cut. Nobody saw us, but we didn’t breathe easy till we were under the high bank and sheltered from the house. Of course, we weren’t safe even then, for if anybody had looked down there and seen a strange boat tied alongside the scow of Mr. Willis’s he naturally would wonder about it and want to know who came in it and where they were. Sammy fixed that part of it up pretty well by shoving the boat out a dozen feet and then throwing a big armful of brush over the bow of it. He ran the rope through the grass and left the end where we could get at it in a hurry and haul the boat in. I went up as far as I dared on the steps, and everything looked safe to me. Unless you were suspicious and looking for something you wouldn’t have noticed the boat at all.

“Tallow,” says Mark, who had been sitting on the bottom step pinching his cheek, “folks that’re scairt are easier to f-f-fool than folks that ain’t.”

“I guess so,” says I.

“They’re worryin’ about themselves, and wonderin’ if anything’s goin’ to hurt ’em, and when a feller gits to fussin’ about himself he ain’t got much t-t-t-time to think about anything else.”

My, how he spluttered!

“That’s right,” I says, remembering well how I’d felt that night at the cave keeping watch all alone and wondering what had made the footprint in the sand with the toes off to one side. “Scare a man good and you got him.”

“What scares a man most—somethin’ he kin see or somethin’ he can’t?”

I saw what he was driving at right off. “Why, somethin’ he can’t see and can’t understand. The more mysterious it is the more scairt he’ll git.”

He nodded. “Then,” says he, “the thing for us to do is scare Batten and the rest of them stiff.”

I knew by the looks of him that he had a scheme; you could always tell by the winking of his eyes and the way he wiggled his left thumb sort of excited-like.

“Go ahead,” says I; “let’s have it.”

“We started it the other day with the dinner-bell. I bet old Willis is shiverin’ about that yet. We kin give ’em some more of it. Then, maybe, Sammy kin help us. Remember his showin’ us how a p-p-panther screamed?”

I should say I did remember. I never heard such a blood-curdling noise in all my life. I was sitting right by Sammy at the cave when he made it, and it was broad daylight, but the little hairs on the back of my neck rose straight up, and I was nervous all the rest of the day. I should say I did remember it.

“We’ll use that, and then they’ll be discoverin’ the disappearance of the d-d-dog. If other things has happened that’ll bother ’em some. Maybe, too, we kin fix it so they’ll see Sammy’s footprint. Oh, I guess we kin s-s-scare ’em, all right.”

I began to think so, too.

“Let’s commence,” I says.

“You go around into the orchard and whang at the bell. Sammy and I’ll stay on the east side and see what we kin do. When I give the whistle make for the boat.”

I made for the orchard and crouched down in a fence corner where I could get a good sight at the bell. I’d filled my pockets chock full of the best stones I could find, nice round fellows about the size of marbles, and there were new rubbers on my sling-shot. I hadn’t taken any chances. When I was all settled I got to my knees and let her fly. The first time I missed, but the second time the old bell went glang. I scrouged down out of sight and waited. In a minute old Mr. Willis stuck his head out of the door, his eyes bulging, and looked all over. He stood there quite awhile, sort of undecided. Then he turned his back, and at that I shot again. Glang went the bell, and he jumped a foot. When he landed he was turned all the way around.

“Hey! Mr. Batten! Mr. Batten!” he yelled.

Batten came running to the door to know what was the matter. Willis was excited and talked loud, so I could hear every word he said. He started in by telling how the bell rang the other day with nobody to ring it, and how the dog had yelped, and how something had slammed the door when he went in. “It ain’t nat’ral,” he squeaked. “I dunno what’s doin’ it, but it ain’t the hand of man. No, siree! And here she’s just rung twice right under my nose.”

“JUST RUNG TWICE RIGHT UNDER MY NOSE”

“Bosh!” says Batten. “You’re nervous and dreaming.”

“Didn’t you hear that there bell ring?”

“I was in the front of the house working; I didn’t notice anything.”

They were facing each other and not looking toward the bell at all, so I let her have another one. Glang she went, and I thought Willis was going to fall off the steps. “There!” he yelled, shaking his skinny hand in Batten’s face. “There, maybe you heard that, eh? Maybe I was dreaming then. Now, tell me what made that. Who rung it? No human bein’ rung it, I say. Something’s gone wrong with this place, it has! It’s ghosts, that’s what it is; and I’m a-goin’ to pack and git for town.”

“Ghosts!” snorts Batten. “Bosh!” But he didn’t look easy in his mind, and was watching the bell uncomfortable-like. “There ain’t no such thing,” he says.

“No sich thing! Why, my father he—”

He’d got Batten looking at him instead of the bell, so I banged it again. This time Batten jumped most as high as Willis.

“Bill!” he yelled; “come here, Bill!”

A big young fellow in his shirt-sleeves, with a pencil in his hand, came to the door. I judged he was the drawing-man that was taking off the design of the engine. They palavered quite a spell, and I didn’t get a chance to shoot; besides, I didn’t want it to get too common. Even a ghost that hangs around too much will get to be a habit; folks will get used to it, and it won’t scare them any more. I let them talk.

“Where’s the dog?” says Batten, all of a sudden, and commenced to whistle and call. Of course the dog didn’t come, and you could see that worried them.

“He never goes off,” said Willis, and he tried whistling; but the dog was a long ways away, and the rope that tied him to his tree was good and stout.

“This,” says Batten, “is getting to look kind of funny.” He was one of those middle-sized men with too much under their vests, and a sticky-looking complexion, and eyes that always seemed as if somebody’d just spilled a mite of water into them. He wasn’t handsome at any time, but now he got kind of yellow mixed with green, and his fingers began to shut and open. By all signs he was pretty average uncomfortable.

Well, just then Sammy let out an awful screech like a panther that’s been shot. It went up high and came down low and went into your ear like it was trying to bore a hole through your head. I’d been expecting it, and I knew what it was, but that didn’t make a bit of difference; I was about as scared as Batten and Willis. They got white; I could see it way where I was. The color seemed just to pop out of their faces. It seemed like I ought to have heard it make a noise like when you pull a cork out of a bottle.

“What’s that?” says Batten, and grabs a hold on Willis.

Willis he didn’t say a word, but just sagged against the door, and the fellow they called Bill ducked inside and then poked his head out and glared all around with his eyes almost laying on his cheeks. I took another crack at the bell.

Every one of them jumped into the house and slammed the door. I didn’t think it would be a good idea to do anything more just then, but to sort of let what we had done sink in. So I sat still, watching the house. All at once I heard a sound close behind me, and, being pretty excited anyhow and all on edge, I liked to have jumped up and hollered, but I didn’t, which was lucky, for it wasn’t anybody but Sammy, grinning away and plumb tickled to death with himself. He motioned with his finger for me to follow him.

“Fat boy says come,” he whispered, and then giggled. “They jump, eh? Ding goes bell; they jump. Ding goes bell; they jump some more. Sammy laugh and fat boy laugh. Then Sammy make panther screech. So. Everybody jump. I guess bad men scairt, eh?”

“They looked scared to me,” I says. “But scared is as scared does. Wait till we see.”

We all laid up among the trees a couple of fields east of Willis’s and had some sandwiches and one thing and another which I had been wanting quite a while. It was way past noon, and I hate to have meal-time go by without paying some kind of attention to it. After we ate we took it easy. Sammy went to sleep and Mark dozed. I never can do much sleeping when it’s daytime—seems like such a waste of time—so I started cutting my initials into a big elm tree. While I was whittling I got to thinking; I guess there isn’t a better way to think than to whittle. Just get your knife going good, and your head seems to go at the same time. I bet if I could whittle all the time in school I’d stand up at the head of the class. Things don’t puzzle you so. You just sit and think, lazy-like, and the first thing you know you see it just as plain. Well, I began figuring out what we were doing without intending to think about it at all, and all of a sudden we began to look pretty foolish to me. Yes, sir. Mark and I looked foolish, and Sammy was foolish, anyhow, so there we were. I reached over and kicked Mark.

“Wake up!” says I.

“What’s m-m-matter?”

“I been thinkin’.”

“That ain’t no reason for wakin’ me up.”

“This is a silly thing we’re a-doin’,” I says.

That made him sit up sudden, for if there was anything he hated it was to look silly, or to do anything foolish and get caught at it. I don’t know what he wouldn’t have done to keep folks from laughing at him, or from getting into a scrape that made him look ridiculous.

“What’s silly about it?”

“The hull thing,” says I, “from A to Izzard.”

He puckered up his face and his eyes got squinty, like they always do when he’s mad. “If you want to back out,” he snaps, “go ahead.”

“I don’t look like backin’ out, do I?”

“What’s the matter, then?”

“Oh,” says I, “the hull idee of it. Ain’t it sort of reedic’lous for you and me, a couple of kids, and Sammy, a half-witted Injun, comin’ up here to git the best of three growed men, and one of ’em from Pittsburg? Why,” says I, “them men forgit more from breakfast till dinner than all of us know put together.”

“Maybe so,” says he.

“They were smart enough to git your pa’s engine, and I bet they’re smart enough to keep it, leastways so far as us kids is concerned. Seems to me we went at it wrong. Hadn’t there ought to be some way of gittin’ back that engine without smougin’ it this way? I bet there is. What we should ’a’ done was to go to some man in Wicksville we could trust and find out what to do.”

He didn’t say anything, but looked like he’d lost his last friend. Anybody could see I was right, and he couldn’t do anything else but admit it, but admitting wasn’t one of the things Marcus Aurelius Fortunatus Tidd hankered to do oftener than was necessary.

“And,” says I, “so far’s scarin’ ’em goes, what good’ll it do? Maybe we kin keep old Willis hoppin’, and maybe we kin make Batten and the other feller a little nervous, but with them it ain’t goin’ to last. They’re city men, and eddicated men, and when they git to thinkin’ it over they’re goin’ to be more mad than scairt, and they’ll be lookin’ to see who’s puttin’ up a job on ’em. Ghosts is all right for old codgers like Willis, but you got to trot out a perty lively sperret to keep Henry C. Batten a-guessin’ long.”

While I was talking Mark was cocking his ear up the road, and I stopped to listen. Faint-like we could hear a rattling, and a tinny sort of sound, with a whistle going high over it all, a whistle that was whistling “Marching Through Georgia” with bird warbles and jumps and trills and things all scattered through. It kept coming closer and closer and louder and louder. We crept out and looked up the road. It was a horse and wagon, a big wooden wagon, painted the kind of red that railroads paint their box-cars; and it looked pretty much like a little box-car for a horse to draw. There wasn’t anything funny about it, for that kind of wagons came through Wicksville half a dozen times a year. It was a tin peddler who traded dishpans and stuff like that for old rags and rubber and what-not. Sometimes they’d have a big bundle of buggy whips besides the tinware.

The driver was lopping back on his seat, with his nose pointed straight up, whistling away like he was paid for it by the hour. You couldn’t see much of his face but the under side of his chin, which isn’t rightly face at all, I suppose. When he got opposite us I began whistling “Marching Through Georgia,” too, as loud as I could. He brought his head down slow and sat up, never missing a note. Then he jerked on the lines to stop the horse and looked down at us, his face all puckered up with his whistling, and went right on until he got to the end of the verse. He was an oldish fellow, with one of those long, thin faces, sort of caved in at the cheeks, that usually go with lean six-footers. His skin was wrinkled and brown, and his eyes, which had a lot of wrinkles running every which way from them, were brown, too. His hair wasn’t red, and it wasn’t yellow, and it wasn’t any other color I ever heard of. He quit whistling, as I said, when he got to the end of the verse; but he didn’t speak right off, only looked at us and felt of his nose, wiggling it a little with his fingers like he wanted to make sure it was on right and wasn’t likely to go flying off unexpected. Then he spoke with a voice that was little and squeaky and raspy.

“My name,” says he, “is Zadok Biggs. I venture to say you never heard that name before—Zadok. No? It is rare, very rare. It was given to me in a spirit of prophesy, of prophesy by my father, a remarkable man. Zadok, my friends, is from the Hebrew, and signifies Just. You see! Just Biggs is my name, then—and it fits. Nobody can deny that it fits. Just by name and just by nature. To that I may add just by habit and just in dealings. I have a judicial mind, my friends and who knows, had not commerce lured me from my books, but I might have risen to greatness in the law—even to the bench of the Supreme Court in Washington? Who can say?”

None of us could, so we kept still about it.

He kept right on. “Ah, you look pleasant, and you listen well. I will dismount—climb down is the commoner expression—and rest with you.”

He got down clumsily and when he stood on the ground we saw that he wasn’t five feet high, but almost three feet wide. You looked at his face, and felt sure it belonged to a man six foot six long by a foot wide and skinny; then you looked at the rest of him and—well, he didn’t match. He’d got hold of the wrong head somewhere.

His horse edged over and began eating grass.

“There,” said Mr. Zadok Biggs, “is a lesson for you, my friends. Take it to heart. Learn from dumb creatures, learn from nature, learn from man, learn from books, learn everywhere and anywhere. The lesson my horse teaches at this moment is: Neglect no opportunity. You observe he eats. He might well have stood in the sand without eating, but, behold! the opportunity to eat presents itself, and without hesitation he avails himself of it. Bear this in mind—never overlook opportunity.”

“We’re around here lookin’ for opportunities, but there don’t any seem to show up,” I says. And Mark scowled at me to keep still.

“Don’t be discouraged. I don’t know what kind of an opportunity you want, but, whatever it may be, it will come. It always does. Everything has got an opportunity tied to its tail like a tin can, and if you keep on listening you’ll hear it jangling.”

I could see that idea pleased Mark, and he began to look more cheerful.

“What did you say your names were?” asked Mr. Biggs. “Not Wilkins, I hope, nor Sauer, nor yet Perkins. I can’t abide those names, so give me warning if any of them are yours and I’ll be going on. I can’t have anything to do with a man if he has one of those names.”

“Mine’s Martin,” I told him, “and that’s Marcus Aurelius Fortunatus Tidd, and that over there is Sammy—just Sammy.”

“Very good, very good, indeed, especially our friend here to the right. His parents have displayed marked aptitude for naming children. His name is an achievement, a mark of genius. I should like to grasp the hand of the parent who gave you that name.”

“It was my father,” says Mark. “He got it out of the Decline and F-f-fall of the Roman Empire.”

“Excellent! You have made me your friend for life. Bear it in mind. I, Zadok Biggs, am your friend for life. Your name did it; I shall treasure it in my memory. It stands at the top of the list—the very top.”

He talked on and on, telling us about his travels and adventures, asking us a question once in a while; and altogether I thought he was a pretty good sort of a man, and better company I never met. At last he says: “You were speaking of opportunity. May I inquire—ask is the more common word—what opportunity you are looking for. I do not desire to pry. Zadok Biggs is the least inquisitive of men, but perhaps I can aid—help—you with my advice.”

“We are lookin’,” says Mark, and I was mighty surprised at him, “for an opportunity to git back a t-t-turbine.”

“Oh,” says Zadok Biggs, looking kind of blank and bewildered, “a turbine, eh? Of course, a turbine—engine is the more usual expression, I believe. Who, if I may ask, has the turbine?”

Mark told him the whole thing, and he nodded his head and muttered and scowled as he listened. When Mark was done Zadok Biggs sat still a long time. Finally he said, “There are no two ways about it, the opportunity would come, but, I pause to ask, will it come soon enough, or if it comes will you be able to take full advantage of it. On these points I must admit, in spite of your name, that I do not know. It seems dubious—doubtful is the more customary expression—very dubious.” He stopped again and pulled two stalks of grass which he chewed and chewed like he was getting some sort of help from them. Pretty soon he says, “If I were you, in your circumstances and surroundings, I would go back to Wicksville, a fine town, and tell the story to a man I could trust. It would be the safer way, the surer way. Mind I do not say your schemes are impossible—nothing is impossible to a boy named Marcus Aurelius Fortunatus Tidd, nothing, but it would be safer.”

Mark frowned and looked at the ground. After a while he raised his eyes and sighed. “If,” says he, “the opportunity ain’t showed up in an hour I’ll go b-b-back.”

Zadok Biggs scrambled to his feet and clambered up on his wagon. “I’m journeying—driving is the more usual word—to Wicksville. I shall arrive to-morrow, for I stop to-night on the way. Bear in mind that I am your friend—your friend for life. If I can be of assistance—do anything for you—let me know. I shall be easy to find.”

With that he drove off down the road, whistling “Marching Through Georgia” to the top of his voice, or to the top of his whistle, and we watched him till his wagon turned the bend.

“Well,” says Mark, “he seemed to agree with you.”

“Yes,” I says. “He’s a man of good sense.”

“B-b-but I got an hour yet,” Mark says, getting in the last word.

CHAPTER XIV

Pretty soon we couldn’t even hear the tin-peddler’s whistle, and Mark got up onto his feet, painful-like. He stretched, which was taking a chance on busting out some seams, and yawned. Lots of things Mark Tidd does look funny, but if there’s anything more comical a fat boy can do than yawn I’d give something to see it.

“Just an hour,” says he, “to f-find that opportunity.”

“Might not take ten minutes,” I says. “From what I know of opportunities they’re onreliable. They’re just as apt to catch you early in the mornin’ as late at night. No tellin’ when they come prowlin’ around.”

“We’ll go ahead like I p-planned for an hour. Then we’ll go home if nothin’ hasn’t turned up.”

“Good!” says I. “That suits me down to the ground.”

“There ain’t but sixty minutes in an hour,” says he, “and every one that gits away from you is one less you got. Let’s be stirrin’ around.”

“Stir ahead,” I told him, getting onto my feet. “Get your old spoon to workin’.”

Mark was looking at Sammy with a kind of glint in his eye. He didn’t need to tell me he was thinking of some use to put that big fellow to; you could see it sticking out all over him.

“Um,” says he. “You’re too dangerous-lookin’ to waste, Sammy.”

Sammy grinned like it was the finest compliment a boy could think of, and wriggled his toes. Well, sir, that was all Mark needed to give him an idea—just the wiggling of a toe.

“That’s the ticket,” he says in his tickled-to-death voice. “Wasn’t there a fresh-spaded flower-bed just in front of the porch there, Tallow?”

“All raked over and as neat as a pin,” I says. “Bet the seeds hain’t been planted six hours.”

“It’s where they’ll be s-s-sure to see it.”

“Right under anybody’s nose that comes out on the porch.”

“Fine! We’ll give ’em somethin’ to look at, then. Now, Sammy, listen to what I’m a-goin’ to say to you, and listen good. You jest make believe all of you is Injun and that you’re a-crawlin’ up on a camp of enemies. The camp of enemies is the house, and if you git seen they’ll more’n likely burn you at the stake. Well, you go mouchin’ along till you git to that flower-bed, and then you up and step careful right in the middle of it with that b-b-busted foot of yours. Leave a good, plain mark like was in the sand at the cave. Then come back a-kitin’.”

Sammy grinned some more and wriggled his hands and sort of twisted all over like a cat does when it wants you to feed it. We watched him crawl down along the hedge, and then all at once he ducked out of sight, and, no matter how we strained our eyes, we couldn’t catch even a wabble of the bushes.

“If it looks as mysterious to Batten as it did to us I guess they’ll do considerable wonderin’ about it,” I says.

We sat pretty anxious and quiet waiting for Sammy to come back. It didn’t look to us like the folks in the house could do Sammy harm once he got a start, but somebody might come onto him unexpected and swat him with something; and then where’d we be, with nobody to carry the turbine if we did manage to get a hold on it? But we needn’t have worried. The first thing we knew there was Sammy standing right by us, chuckling like all get out.

“Sammy step on flower-bed. Sammy careful—oh, very careful. Make foot show plain. Make Sammy’s funny foot show in dirt. Sammy helps, eh? Big help?”

“You b-bet Sammy’s a help,” Mark told him, and patted him on the back. “We never’d git anywheres without you, would we, Tallow?”

“I should say not,” I says, just as solemn as I could; and maybe you think Sammy wasn’t tickled. Why, he most wiggled out of his skin!

“I’m goin’ to sneak over and see if anything happens,” says I. “I kin hide among the evergreens and watch. It ought to be worth seein’.”

“Don’t go takin’ no r-r-risks.” Mark like to have strangled over the last word. “Keep your ears open, and if I whistle the whistle, come a-runnin’.”

I went around in front and wriggled through the hedge. Nobody was in sight around the house, so I squirmed up, dodging from tree to tree until I was only about twenty feet away from the steps. There I crouched down among the prickles of a fat evergreen and waited. I could see the steps as plain as could be, but you’d have had to hunt for me careful to have found me, even if you knew I was hiding around.

Well, it wasn’t more than ten minutes before Bill came out rubbing his hand like he’d been writing or drawing and the muscles were tired. He sat down on the top step and pulled a cigar out of his vest. I could see the red-and-gold band around it. He bit off the end and struck a match. I was interested to see how he snapped the match away, and made up my mind to try it myself. He shot it just like I’d shoot a marble, and it went straight. It fell right on Willis’s flower-bed. Now, when you snap a thing that way you always watch to see if you hit what you shot at, or, anyhow, to see where you do hit, and Bill saw the match strike right alongside of Sammy’s footprint. I saw him lean forward quick and stretch his neck. He grabbed a hold on the post and pulled himself up, and then walked over to the bed. He leaned over, knelt down, and I could hear him grunt with surprise.

“Well,” says he to himself, “well.”

In a minute he got up and went into the house. Before long he came back with Batten, and both of them looked at the footprint.

“What is it?” says Bill.

Batten looked kind of funny and shook his head.