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.
[Illustration: Map]