Most likely we would have slept till noon that first morning at uncle’s
place, but he didn’t let us. Uncle had an idea that day began as soon as
you could see to get around without a lantern, and it didn’t seem to me
that I had finished slapping a mosquito that buzzed around me before I
went to sleep when somebody jerked the cover off me and yelled,
“Grub-pile.” I got one eye open enough to see Uncle Hieronymous standing
there grinning like all git out, and Mark and Tallow and Plunk squirming
around disgusted in bed.
“Bacon’s frizzlin’,” says uncle. “I let you oversleep this mornin’,
figgerin’ you was wore out. Come a-runnin’! Git up! Why, it’ll be noon
in a matter of eight hours!”
There was a smell of something coming in from the kitchen that waked me
up quick. I got my feet out on the floor and looked over at Mark Tidd.
He was sitting on the bed, with his pudgy nose pointing to the door and
sniffing away with the happiest expression I ever saw on his face. Part
of the smell was bacon, and part of it was frying potatoes, but the best
of it was something else better than both of them put together, and I
couldn’t make out what it was.
“Hungry?” says Uncle Hieronymous.
Mark answered him. “I c-c-could eat the tail of the whale that
s-s-swallered Jonah,” says he.
We dressed in a hurry so we could get nearer to that smell. By the time
we were washed uncle had everything on the table, and we rushed at it
like we’d been fasting for forty days and forty nights. Then we saw
where the best part of the smell came from. It was little fish all brown
and crisp outside—a heaping platter of them.
“Troutses,” says Uncle Hieronymous. “Leetle speckled troutses. Ketched
by me personal right in my front yard, so to speak. Got ’em special for
you jest before startin’ to the station.” Then he made up another little
poem:
“When you see a leetle trout
You’d sooner eat than go without.”
Nobody said another word until there wasn’t a thing left on the table
but little heaps of fish-bones. Uncle moved back his chair and grinned,
and we all grinned back at him. We felt just like grinning. I don’t know
when I’ve felt so good.
“Marthy and Mary is waitin’ to get acquainted with you,” uncle says.
“They’re peculiar, Marthy and Mary is—most exceedin’ly peculiar—so you
want to be p’tic’lar how you act. I wouldn’t have Marthy and Mary get a
bad idea of your mannerses for anythin’.”
He shut the door tight and then went to the window.
“Marthy!” says he, as loud as he could yell. “Mary! Comp’ny to the
house. Hey, Marthy! Hey, Mary!”
Well, sir, we didn’t know what to expect, but in a minnit two pure-white
cats came hustling out from among the underbrush with their tails
sticking straight up in the air and the most interested expression on
their faces you ever saw.
“Come here to the winder,” says uncle to me. He put his head out and
spoke to the cats. “Marthy and Mary,” says he, “this here young person
is my nephew, Binney Jenks. Git the name—Binney Jenks.”
The cats both says “Miau,” and reared up on their hind legs with their
fore paws against the house.
Uncle Hieronymous sort of drew back. “Don’t come a-jumpin’ up here,” he
says. “I won’t have it. You know better’n that, both of you. This here
is Mark Tidd,” he went on, “and this is Tallow Martin, and this is Plunk
Smalley.”
It didn’t seem to me the cats was much interested in us, but uncle
seemed to think they were all excited over our being there.
“Ree-markable cats,” says he. “Intelligent! Oh, my, hain’t they
intelligent! Why, boys, the amount of brains them cats has got would
s’prise the legislature down to Lansing.”
He went to the stove and got some fish out of the frying-pan. “Marthy
and Mary,” he says, important and dignified-like, “I’m a-goin’ to
celebrate this here occasion by feedin’ you troutses. Troutses hain’t
made for cats, except by way of markin’ important happenin’s. Chubs and
perches is for cats, with maybe a bass or a pickerel, but troutses is
for men almost exclusive. Here’s one for you, Marthy, and here’s one for
you, Mary—and bear in mind, both of you, that you’re much obleeged to
these here boys. Lemme hear you say much obliged.”
Martha and Mary both said “Miau,” but I guess it was because they wanted
the fish uncle was dangling over their noses.
“There,” says he, drawing himself up as proud as a
turkey-gobbler—“there. Intelligent, eh? Never saw cats like that before,
_I_ bet.”
The cats sailed into that fish as enthusiastic as we boys had a little
while before. Uncle gave each of them a couple. When they were through
he spoke to them again.
“That’s all,” he says. “I hain’t goin’ to give you no more and be
responsible for ruinin’ your stummicks. Now go on off. D’you hear me? Go
on off and catch mouses so’s I can come out.”
“C-c-can’t you go out while they’re there?” Mark wanted to know.
Uncle looked at him astonished. “What? Me? Go out with them two cats?”
He shook his head two or three times and looked at Mark regretful-like.
“I’m s’prised at you, Mark Tidd. O’ course not. Never. Why,” says he,
“you can’t never tell what cats’ll do—especially white cats.” He wagged
his head again. I most laughed right there. Think of it! Uncle
Hieronymous was afraid of his cats.
Marthy and Mary trotted off out of sight as obedient as could be, and
uncle unlocked the door. It was our first look outside. Right in front
of the house, which was made of logs, was a little stream. You could
hear it gurgling and pouring along, and it sounded as pleasantly and
neighborly as could be. All around was woods. The house sat in the
middle of a clearing a couple of hundred feet wide, and beyond that all
you could see was trees, trees, trees. The clearing was on a little rise
of ground, and from the door you could look off across the brook for
miles over what looked like a kind of swamp—not a squashy, boggy swamp,
but a damp swamp where trees grew, and where, most likely, there was
bears and maybe deer.
“Have you lived here always, uncle?” I asked him.
“Always? Me? Not always, not always, by any means. Fifteen years ago I
lived up in what they call the copper country now. Yes, sir, right
amongst it, so to speak, only I wasn’t minin’. Not me. I owned a forty
of timber and logged it a spell. Then along come a feller and offered me
a price for it, and I up and sold to him. Yes, sir, sold out bag and
baggage. No I didn’t, neither.” He commenced to laugh kind of as if
there was a joke on somebody. “Friend of mine, he advised me I should
keep the mineral rights, and, by gum! I own ’em to this very day. Me!
Mineral rights. Haw!”
“What’s m-m-mineral rights?” It was Mark asked him of course. None of
the rest of us cared a whoop what mineral rights were, but Mark wasn’t
that way. You never could go mentioning anything strange around him
without being made to put in a spell explaining it.
“Mineral rights,” says Uncle Hieronymous, “is the rights to the minerals
and metals and sich a-hidin’ in the ground under a piece of prop’ty. One
feller can own the trees, another can own the land, and another can own
whatever happens to be found under the land. And that’s what I own yet.
Haw! If somebody was to up and find a di’mond-mine on that al’ forty,
who in the world would it b’long to? Why, to me, Hieronymous Alphabet
Bell, and to nobody else that walks on two laigs.”
Mark nodded that he understood, and then Uncle Hieronymous wanted to
know what we figured on doing that day.
“L-l-let’s explore,” says Mark.
“We’ll git lost,” says I.
“Shucks. We won’t go b-b-back into the woods. We’ll just go along the
b-b-brook.”
“Good idee,” says uncle. “Get acquainted with the neighborhood, so to
speak. Whenever you git back’ll be time to eat. If you get lost whistle
like this,” and he showed us a whistle that went, “_Wheet, wheet, wheet,
whee, hoo._” “Reg’lar old lumber-camp signal,” he says.
“D-don’t you want to come?” Mark asked him.
“Me? Goodness, no! Couldn’t spare the time. Couldn’t spare a minnit. Got
a lot of thinkin’ to do to-day, and consid’able newspaper-readin’, to
say nothin’ of washin’ dishes and catchin’ a mess of fish. No, I don’t
guess I got any time to spare. Why, there’s things I’ve been plannin’ to
think about for weeks, and puttin’ off and puttin’ off. I picked to-day
to study over ’em, and it’s got to be done. I got to git out there and
lay onto my back and figger out what I’d ’a’ done if ever I’d got
elected to Congress, and what keeps one of these here airyplanes up in
the air; and another important p’int is why dogs wag their tails when
they’re tickled and cats when they’re mad. You kin see I got my hands
full.
“Some folks sit and think and think,
And some folks writes it down with ink,”
he finished up. “Them that thinks and writes it down,” he says, “is
authors and poets and philosophers, and them that jest thinks is
loafers.”
We were just getting ready to start out when a man that uncle called
Billy came driving up in a rickety buggy. As soon as he got in sight he
began to yell at us, but we couldn’t understand what he was talking
about. When he got close to the house he drew up and yelled louder than
ever:
“Feller name of Collins here?”
“No,” says uncle, scratching his chin. “We got a lot of names around,
but Collins hain’t one of ’em. Maybe some other’ll do.”
“It’s a telegraft,” says Billy, “and a dummed funny one, too. None of
the boys around town could make head or tail to it. Collins was the
name. Left word to the hotel he was goin’ to stop somewheres on the
Middle Branch. Mighty funny telegraft. Wisht I knowed what it was
about.”
“Maybe he’s up to Larsen’s,” says uncle. “I’ve knowed folks to stop
there that wouldn’t hesitate a minnit to get telegrafts. Why, Billy, a
feller there got a express parcel once.”
Billy held a yellow envelope in his hand and shook his head at it.
“Dummed peculiar!” he says. “The only words of sense to it is that
somebody’s comin’ t’ meet him. Want to see it?”
“Dun’no’s I do, Billy,” says Uncle Hieronymous. “I got most too much to
figger about now without havin’ more added unnecessary.”
“Mysterious, I call it,” Billy says, and shook up his horses. “You bet
you I’m a-goin’ to ask the feller what’s the meanin’ of it.”
We watched Billy till he went out of sight around a bend in the sandy
road; then Mark Tidd, with his little eyes twinkling the way they do
when he sees something more than ordinary funny, says: “We b-b-better
get started. There’s consid’able j-jungle to explore.”
Right off we knew Mark was going to pretend we were over in Africa or
somewheres plugging along through a forest where the foot of white man
had never trod or shot a gun or built a fire. [Note, by Mark Tidd: Must
have been a trained foot.]
“I’ll g-go first,” says Mark. “Binney, you be the r-rear-guard. Plunk
will watch to the right, and Tallow to the l-left.”
So we started up-stream, keeping close to the water for fear of getting
lost.
“Keep your eye p-peeled for boa-constrictors,” says Mark. “Right here we
don’t need worry about n-n-natives, ’cause this part of the jungle is
full of b-big snakes. Natives is terrified of snakes. If you begin to
f-f-feel funny, lemme know. More’n likely it’ll be a boa-constrictor
t-tryin’ to charm you. They kin do it. Yes, sir, they kin sit off a
hundred feet and look at a man with them b-beady eyes of their’n and
ch-ch-charm you so’s you can’t move.”
It made us sort of shiver, because you never know what you’re going to
bump into in the woods, especially woods you don’t know anything about.
I never heard of any boa-constrictors in Michigan, but that wasn’t any
reason why some couldn’t be there. There’s lots in South America, and if
one took a notion to crawl up to Baldwin I couldn’t see anything to stop
him. It would be quite a crawl for an ordinary snake, but a
boa-constrictor, being so big, ought not to have much trouble about it.
“I’ll be glad,” says I, “when the Panama Canal is done.”
“Why?” Mark asked.
“’Cause boa-constrictors won’t be able to get acrost it,” I says. “It’ll
be a purtection to the folks of the United States against the savage
beasts that live in the Amazon jungles when they’re to home.”
Mark grinned. “I hain’t n-never heard that exact reason given,” says he,
“for buildin’ a canal, b-b-but I dun’no’ but it’s as good as a lot of
others.”
We went hiking along for another half an hour. All of a sudden Mark
stopped and held up his finger. “S-s-s-savages,” he whispered. In a
jiffy we were all lying on our stummicks in the high grass, for, sure
enough, we could hear a splashing in the stream that meant somebody or
something was coming down toward us.
Almost without breathing we waited. Nearer and nearer the sound came,
until a man showed up around the bend. He was wading right in the stream
and flopping a fish-pole back and forth in the most ridiculous way you
ever saw. He’d snap his line ahead till it touched the water and then
snap it back and then snap it ahead again. Just like cracking a whip it
was.
“Acts crazy,” I says to Mark.
“Crazy nothin’,” he says. “That’s the way you c-c-cast a fly. He’s
trout-f-f-fishin’.”
“Oh,” says I, and watched him, more interested than ever. I’d heard
about fly-casting, but somehow I hadn’t expected to see anybody actually
doing it. The man was maybe a hundred yards off, but we could see he had
funny boots on that came way up under his shoulders. There was a little
net hanging from his belt, and a basket with a cover over his shoulder.
Pretty soon I heard Mark grunt surprised-like.
“What’s matter?” I asked him.
“Know who he is?” Mark asked.
I looked close. The sun came through a place in the trees and shone
right on his face, and I recognized the man. It wasn’t anybody in the
world but the Mr. Collins that helped us pull Mark out of the wreck.
“It was him the t-t-telegraft was for,” Mark says to himself.
In five minutes Collins was almost in front of us. The water was to his
waist, and he was wading slow. All of a sudden he stopped and pulled his
pole up into the air. About thirty feet ahead of him something splashed
in the water, and I could see his pole was bent way over.
“He’s g-g-got one,” Mark says, excited.
Sure enough, he had. It looked like a big one the way it pulled and
jumped and sloshed around. Collins reeled and splashed around
considerable himself, all the time getting closer to where we were. Then
before you could say “Bingo” he stepped on something slippery—a smooth
stone, I guess—and let out a yell. His feet went up and he went down
_ker-splash_! For a second he floundered around like a hog in a puddle,
throwing water all over the scenery, but he scrambled back onto his
feet, with his pole still in his hand.
“He h-held it out of water all the t-t-time,” says Mark, sort of
admiringly. “He’s the stick-to-it kind.”
It’s the way a fellow acts when he’s alone that counts. Collins might
have got mad and shook his fist and talked strong language, but he
didn’t. He just grinned kind of sheepish and went right on working with
his fish till he got it close to him. Then he grabbed his little net and
scooped it up.
“Whoop!” says he, taking it in his hand. “Ten inches, and speckled!”
Mark stood up. “D-do you always catch ’em that way?” he asked. “I never
fished for trout, but if it’s n-n-necessary to dive after ’em I
calc’late I’ll st-stick to perch.”
Collins grinned first and then said: “Hello! What you doing here?”
“Explorin’,” says Mark.
“Stopping near?”
Mark jerked his thumb back toward Uncle Hieronymous’s.
“Who with?”
“His uncle,” says Mark, pointing to me.
Collins looked more than ordinary interested. “Lemme see, you told me
his name back on the train, didn’t you? I don’t remember it.”
“D-d-don’t b’lieve I did,” says Mark.
“It’s Hieronymous Alphabet Bell,” says I, and Mark reached out with his
foot and kicked me. The grass was so high Collins couldn’t see him do
it.
“Oh,” says Collins, and he waded to shore. “Want to see my fish?”
We looked at it. It was a beauty, slender and graceful-like, with pretty
red spots all down its sides.
Collins sat down and talked to us about fish and bears and deer and the
woods, and then, the first we knew, he’d got the conversation around to
Uncle Hieronymous. Mark looked at me and scowled, but I couldn’t see
why.
“He lives all alone, mostly,” I told Collins, when he asked.
“I hear he’s quite an interesting character,” Collins said. “Guess I’ll
stop in and see him on my way down-stream. He won’t chase me out, will
he?”
I was just going to tell him uncle would be glad to see him when Mark
spoke up:
“D-d-dun’no’s I’d disturb him to-day,” says he. “He’s doin’ somethin’
special, and he’s apt to take a dislike to anybody that in-interrupts
him.”
“Oh,” says Collins. “I better put it off, then.”
“Calc’late so,” says Mark.
“Well, guess I’ll start along. I’m going to be here a few days—up at
Larsen’s. Come to see me.”
We said we would, and he started on down the stream.
As soon as he was out of sight Mark got up quick—quicker than I’ve seen
him move in a dog’s age—and ran down-stream maybe fifty feet, and then,
right at the edge of the water, he stooped over and picked something up.
From where I was I could see it was yellow. He sat right down and put it
on his knee and began smoothing it out. We hurried over to see what he
was up to.
“What you got?” Tallow asked.
Mark grinned and held up a yellow piece of paper.
“Telegraft,” says he. “G-guess it’s the one Billy b-b-brought.”
“Collins drop it?” I wanted to know.
“I hain’t seen n-nobody else go by,” says Mark.
“What’s it say?”
He’d got it all smoothed out now, and, though it was sopping wet and the
ink had run quite a lot, he could read it. For a minnit he didn’t say a
word, but he had the most peculiar look on his face.
“Well?” says I.
He handed it over. At first I couldn’t make head or tail of it. The last
words were plain enough—“Coming by first train”—and the name that was
signed was Billings, but the first part was Chinese to me. All the same,
it kind of reminded me of something.
“Huh!” says I. “What’s it about?”
Mark pulled another paper out of his pocket and handed it to me. It was
the sheet of letter he picked up near the wreck.
“C-c-c-compare ’em,” says he, with a peculiar grin.
I did, and the figures and letters were the identical same: “The S. 40
of the N. W. ¼ of Sec. 6, Town 1 north, R. 4 west.” I was a mite
startled, but, for all that, I couldn’t see what there was to be
startled about. I guess it was the way Mark acted.
“There’s s-somethin’ up,” says he. “I bet a penny it’s got somethin’ to
do with your uncle.” He pinched his cheek and squinted his eyes like he
always does when he’s thinking, and then wagged his head.
“I don’t l-like his looks. He’s too dummed g-g-good-natured.”
“But what’s it all about?”
“How do I know?” he says, impatient. “I got to find out what these
letters and figgers mean, hain’t I? Then maybe I can sort of git an idee
what he’s thrashin’ around for.”
He got up and stuffed both pieces of paper into his pocket.
“Let’s finish exploring and g-git back,” says he. “I’m beginnin’ to
g-g-git hungry.”