ALONE IN THE WOODS
This was not the first time Teddy had gotten in trouble when he and
Janet were alone together. Often it happened at home, and so the
Curlytop girl was not as much surprised as she might have been if this
was the first time.
Janet left the end of the log where she was keeping guard, to catch the
fox if it should rush out, and she hurried around to the end in which
Ted had crawled.
“Can’t you crawl in any farther?” she asked.
The still muffled voice of her brother answered:
“No, I can’t crawl a bit more! I’m stuck!”
“Well, then,” said Janet, in the most natural way possible, “never mind
about the fox. We don’t want him anyhow. Crawl out and we’ll go home.”
“But I _can’t_!” cried Teddy, and now his voice sounded as if he might
be going to cry.
“What can’t you do?” Janet wanted to know.
“I can’t crawl out!” By this time Teddy was very much frightened. Janet
could tell that by the catch in his voice. “I can’t crawl in and I
can’t back up. I’m stuck! I’m stuck! You’d better go and get some one
to help me out!”
But Janet was not going to run away so soon. She made up her mind to
try something herself first.
“I’ll take hold of your feet and pull you out,” she offered. “Keep your
feet still, now!” she commanded, as she went closer to the flapping
shoes of her brother. “Keep ’em still or you’ll kick me!”
“All right,” said Teddy. “You can try, but I don’t believe you can pull
me out.”
Janet could not. Though she tugged and tugged with both hands at Ted’s
shoes, bracing her own feet against the end of the log, she could not
stir her brother one inch.
“Why don’t you wiggle?” she finally asked, quite out of breath.
“Why don’t I what?” asked Ted.
“Why don’t you wiggle a little an’ help yourself?” demanded Janet. “I
can’t do it all alone! When I pull, you wiggle, an’ maybe you’ll get
out that way.”
“All right,” agreed Ted. “But I can’t wiggle very much. It’s awful
tight in here!”
Once more Janet took hold of his shoes and began to pull. At the same
time Ted pushed with his hands backward inside the log and “wiggled.”
But it seemed to be of little use. No more of Ted’s legs stuck out from
inside the log than at first.
Then he suddenly cried:
“Stop! Quit!”
“What’s the matter?” asked Janet. “Am I hurting you?”
“No, but my shoes are coming off!” answered Ted. And even as he spoke
Janet pulled so hard that the left shoe came completely off Ted’s foot,
and the other was partly off.
“Well, now I’ve got to push you,” decided Janet, as she dropped the one
shoe. “If I can’t pull you I got to push you! Maybe you’ll come out the
other end with the fox.”
“There isn’t any fox in here,” said Teddy. “I can see clear through
to the other end and there’s nothing in the log but me--I’m here all
right, an’ I wish I could get out! Oh, dear!”
“I’ll help you! I’ll push,” offered Janet.
She was about to push on Ted’s feet as they stuck from the log, but he
stopped her with a cry.
“Don’t do it! Don’t do it!” he begged. “If you push me any farther I’ll
be stuck worse!”
“What’ll I do then?” asked Janet.
“You go get somebody! Get somebody to help me out!” wailed Ted.
“I will!” cried his sister, and without trying any more she hurried
away through the woods.
She expected to have to go all the way to the bungalow to tell her
father or mother about the plight of poor Teddy. But half way there
Janet met two of the lumbermen and to them she told of her brother’s
plight.
“Caught in a hollow log, is he?” asked one man. “Well, we’ll soon have
him out.”
“Show us where he is, little girl,” said the other man, and Janet led
the way.
On her way back through the woods with the lumbermen, the little
Curlytop girl half feared that when she reached the place where she
had left Ted stuck in the log she might find his feet being nibbled
by the same fox they had tried to catch. But nothing like this had
happened.
There was the log; there was no sign of a fox or other wild animal; and
Ted’s feet were still sticking out, waving slowly.
“Here we are, Ted!” cried Janet. “I’ve brought back two lumbermen with
me.”
“Oh, get me out! Get me out!” wailed Ted, in a muffled voice.
“We’ll soon have you out, little man,” said one of the lumbermen.
“Don’t be afraid. We can easily split this log,” he added to his
companion.
“That’s right,” agreed the other. “See,” he said to Janet, “this log
has a big crack all the way along it. We’ll just put in some wedges
and they will make the crack wider. Then the hole in the log will get
bigger and we can pull your brother out.”
“Oh, I hope you can!” sighed Janet.
“Sure we can!” declared one of the lumbermen. “Stay quiet now, little
man,” he added.
And Teddy kept very still and quiet inside the log while on the outside
the lumbermen cut and drove in with their axes some wedges of wood.
A wedge, you know, is shaped like the letter V. The narrow part was put
in the crack, and then the top, or wide part, was pounded on. As the
V’s went farther and farther into the crack, the crack opened wider.
This made the hole in the log larger as the fallen tree trunk was split
more widely open.
“Oh, now I can get out! Now I can get out!” joyfully cried Ted, as he
felt the log loosening around him. “Now I can get out!”
And a few seconds later he managed to wriggle and back out of the log
himself, little the worse because of his adventure. His face was red,
for it was hot inside the fallen tree, and his clothes were covered
with pieces of brown, rotten wood. But this easily brushed off.
“How did you happen to go in there?” asked one of the men.
“I wanted to drive out a fox so my sister could catch him,” answered
the Curlytop boy.
“Well, I wouldn’t do that again,” the man went on. “In the first place,
no fox will ever run into a place unless there is a way of running out
again, and he can run out quicker than you can run in.
“Another thing, never try to catch a fox in your bare hands. They have
very sharp teeth and they’ll nip you badly. You have to wear heavy
gloves when you handle a fox. But even if you had driven him out of
your sister’s end of the log, Teddy, I guess he would have leaped past
Janet so quickly that it would have looked like a flash of lightning.”
“That’s right!” added the other tree chopper.
“I won’t do it any more,” Teddy promised.
“We didn’t get a crow and we didn’t get a fox,” sighed Janet, rather
sadly.
The lumbermen laughed, and one said:
“You tried to catch two of the hardest creatures in the world to trap.
A fox and a crow are the slyest of all animals and birds, and for years
so many have tried to trap and shoot them that they have grown very
wise.”
“There is a man who lives near us in Cresco,” said Teddy, “who had a
lame, tame crow that could stand on one leg and pull a cork from a
bottle.”
“He could?” cried the lumbermen.
“Not really pull corks,” explained Janet. “He just made a noise like a
cork popping out of a bottle. But he was cute and he would stand on one
leg so funny.”
“But he flew away,” added Teddy. “And if we could find him we’d get ten
dollars reward.”
“I’d look at a crow a long time before I’d give ten dollars for one;
wouldn’t you, Jake?” asked one man of the other.
“That’s right, Sam,” was the answer.
“But if you see this lame, tame crow, will you please tell us?” begged
Janet. “’Cause we’d like to take him back to Mr. Jenk and get the ten
dollars.”
“Yes, if we see that crow we’ll try to catch him for you,” promised the
men.
“And if I got the ten dollars I’d buy my mother a new diamond locket in
place of the one I lost for her,” went on Janet.
“How was that?” asked one of the men, for they took a kindly interest
in the children. Then Janet told how the ornament was lost the day she
and her brother were playing house with Trouble.
“That was too bad,” remarked Jake. And then, as the children went back
home with the crow trap in which they had caught nothing, one lumberman
said to the other:
“I guess there isn’t one chance in a hundred of finding that lame, tame
crow.”
“I should say not,” agreed the other. “Nor of finding that diamond
locket, either.”
Of course those at the bungalow must be told of what had happened to
Ted in the hollow log, and he was warned not to try such a dangerous
thing again.
Many times the Curlytops visited the general store, which was now
running well under the direction of Mr. Martin. The lumbermen and their
families bought their supplies at the store, and so did some of the
near-by farmers. Once Silas Armstrong, on whose load of hay Trouble had
gone to sleep, came to buy groceries, and he had a pleasant chat with
the Curlytops.
It was about a week after Ted’s adventure in the hollow log that
something else happened to him. Some of the lumbermen had been sent to
a distant part of the woods to build a chute, or slide, for the logs
to shoot down into the river. Then a slight accident occurred to the
sawmill machinery and the foreman of it wanted all the help he could
get to mend the trouble.
“I wish Jake and Sam were here,” said the foreman, as he and all the
other men worked hard to mend the broken machinery. “But they’re away
over by the new chute.”
“I’ll go after them and tell them to come here,” offered Ted.
“Will you? All right, young Curlytop!” exclaimed the foreman. “Do you
know the way?”
“Oh, yes!” answered Ted, quite confident.
If Mr. Martin had been there or in the store, which was not far from
the mill, he might not have let Teddy go. But the father of the
Curlytops was off in another part of the forest seeing about something
connected with the business. And Ted never asked his mother if he might
go. He just went.
Off he started through the woods to go to the distant place where Jake
and Sam--the two men who had gotten him out of the log--were working on
the chute.
At first the path through the woods was very plain, and Ted had no
trouble. But after a while the trail became fainter and more than once
the Curlytop boy stopped and looked about him, listening for the sound
of chopping axes.
“I don’t seem to hear any,” he murmured; “but I’m sure this is the
right path.”
But it was not, and the farther Ted wandered the more distant he got
from the place where the men were working. Deeper he went into the
forest until at last he had to stop and give up.
“I--I guess I’m lost!” murmured Ted. His heart began to beat strangely.
It was a fearful feeling to be alone in the woods. And that is what had
happened to poor Teddy.