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.
[Illustration: “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.