TELLS ABOUT HOW WE TRIED TO STOP IT RAINING
Jumping jiminy! That was a new one on _me_. Lakes moving around like
people that live in flats--_good night_! And where would Temple Camp
be, I'd like to know? And just after we paid four dollars and eighteen
cents to put up a springboard.
"If you wouldn't mind," I said, "I'd like to know how that could
happen. Because if it's going away I'm going to stalk it."
"Do you know what erosion is?" he said.
"Not guilty," I told him.
"Well," he said, "it's earth being eaten away, kind of."
"By who?" I asked, "he must have some appetite."
"By the water," he said; "that's what causes changes in topography."
"All right," I said, "I'll take your word for it. But will the lake be
there when we get back, because I've got some eel lines out?"
He said, "Oh, yes, it won't move till May first." "Thank goodness for
that," I told him.
I guess maybe you'd better look at the map now, hey? It isn't much of a
map, but you should worry. If you don't take a good look at it, pretty
soon you won't know where you're at. I guess you can squint out the
valley between the mountains. That's Nick's Valley, everything around
there belonged to old Nick. If he didn't own the moon, it was because
he couldn't reach it.
Now, that's just where we went through, see? And it was all full of
puddles--young lakes. I couldn't draw them with a pencil, but they were
there. I can prove it, because I got my feet wet. Pretty soon Bert
said, "Here's where you ought to have your scout staff with you," and
just then I stumbled down among a lot of brush.
"Now you're in it," he said.
"In what?" I asked him.
"In the bed," he said.
"You call this a bed?" I asked him, "I like a brass bed better."
"If you'd only had your staff, you could have felt ahead."
"I can feel a head now," I told him, "and it's got a good bump on it."
"Well," he said, "you're right in the hollow where the old creek used
to flow. Let's push along through it a little ways and see what we can
dig up."
You couldn't see that it was a hollow just looking at it, but you had
to go down into it and then you knew. It was all grown up with bushes
and we just went along through it, the same as if we were pushing
through a jungle. All of a sudden I felt something crunch under my
foot, and when I picked it up, I saw it was a fish's backbone.
"See," Bert said, "what did I tell you?"
It seemed funny to be squirming our way along where a creek used to
flow before it changed its mind and decided to flow into Bowl Valley.
"Maybe it changed its mind and made the lake because it knew the scouts
were coming, hey?" I asked. "That was a good turn."
"It was a good _long_ turn," he said. "And nobody around here seems to
know anything about this old creek bottom. We just stumbled into it the
same as you did. That's some bump you've got."
"Sure, my topography is changed," I told him.
He said, "Old Nick fought in the Revolutionary War. He owned all this
land around here right through to the lake--I mean Bowl Valley. His
house was at the bottom of Bowl Valley."
"What do you say we fish it up some day?" I asked him.
"All this was his farm," Bert said. "See that old silo there? I guess
that's what it was, or something like it."
"Maybe he hid muskets or powder from the redcoats there, hey?" I said.
Now if you'll look at the map, you'll see just where we were. I was
right on the edge of that ring I made. Do you see the ring? Well, that
ring was really a round hole in the ground just beside the old creek
bottom. Gee, I wish you could have seen that hole. Because you can't
make a hole on a map.
It was about fifty feet deep and about thirty feet wide, I guess, and
it was all walled in with masonry. It looked like a great well. Bert
thought it had something to do with the farm that used to be there,
because quite near it, there was an old foundation. Maybe it was some
kind of a silo, I don't know.
I said, "I'd like to get down in that."
"What for?" Bert said; "there's nothing but puddles at the bottom. How
would you ever get out?"
"Couldn't we drop one of those saplings into it and I could shin up
that?" I said. Because I saw two or three saplings lying around. I
suppose they blew down in the storms lately.
"What would be the use?" he asked; "you can see what's down there. If
we're going to get those letters onto a mail train, we've got to
hustle."
That was enough for me, because I cared more about Skinny than I did
about all the old creek bottoms and holes in the ground this side of
Jericho. So I just said, "Righto," and we started following the old
creek bed, till pretty soon the bushes were so thick that we hit up
north of it a little ways and hiked straight over to the houseboat.
When we got to the house-boat we lowered the skiff and rowed across to
Catskill and mailed the letters. Then we went up the street for a
couple of sodas. Bert bought some peanut brittle, too--I'm crazy about
that. Then we went to another store and got some post cards. Some of
them had pictures of Temple Camp on them. I sent home about six. All
the while it was getting dark and pretty soon it began to rain, so I
said, "Let's go and get a couple more sodas till it holds up." We drank
two sodas each, but even still it didn't hold up.
"We can't make it hold up that way," Bert said; "I don't believe twenty
sodas would do it, the way it's raining now."
"I guess you're right," I said, "but, anyway, I'm willing to try
twenty, if you say so."
No fellow could ever say _I_ was a quitter.