WE HEAR A VOICE
Hervey just held up his finger to remind us, but anyway the man had gone
too far to hear us.
All of a sudden Pee-wee set up a shout, “I see Temple Camp! I see Temple
Camp!”
“Where?” I asked him, all excited.
“I can see the pavilion!” he shouted. “I can see the lake! Hey, mister,
come back with the ladder!”
“I guess you’re right,” Hervey said; “that’s the camp, all right.”
“I discovered it! I discovered it!” Pee-wee yelled. “Hey, mister, come
back with that ladder! I can see Temple Camp! Come back!”
But it wasn’t any use; the man was too far away and the breeze was the
other way, and there we were and we couldn’t do anything.
“Why didn’t you shout sooner?” Pee-wee wanted to know, all excited.
“You were the one to discover the camp,” Hervey said.
“Why didn’t you shout as soon as you saw the man?” he shot back.
“Because I made a solemn vow,” Hervey said.
“Now we’re up against it,” the kid said.
“We’re _up_, all right,” said Warde. “Nobody can deny that.”
“How are we going to get down?” Pee-wee wanted to know. “That’s what you
get for making solemn vows. Solemny vows are all right but they don’t
get you any supper. I can see the smoke going up from the cooking shack.
Do you see it? Away, way off there?”
I could see it all right, and oh boy, it looked good. I could see just a
little dab of blue, all sparkling, and I knew it was Black Lake. I could
see a speck of brown and I knew it was the pavilion. It looked as if it
might be about ten miles off. All around, no matter which way we looked,
were woods and mountains.
“Some panorama,” Warde said.
“You can’t eat panoramas,” the kid shouted.
“Sure you can,” I told him. “Didn’t you ever eat an orama? They fry them
in pans; that’s why they call them panoramas; they’re fine.”
“Yes, and we’ll be marooned here all night too,” he piped up. “There
isn’t anybody for miles around. A lot of good the view is going to do
us. This is the loneliest place I ever saw, I bet it’s haunted. I bet
that’s why everybody moved away.”
Bert said, “I don’t believe any ghosts would stay here, it’s too lonely.
Besides, where would they buy their groceries?”
“Ghosts don’t eat,” the kid said.
“I hope you’ll never be a ghost then,” I told him.
“We’re lucky,” Hervey said. “You ought to thank me for bringing you up
here. We can see just where Temple Camp is. We don’t have to depend on
sign posts that change their minds and turntables that send us back to
where we came from or anything. We can see Temple Camp with our own
eyes. Now we know which way to go.”
“Only we can’t go there,” I said.
He said, “That doesn’t make any difference.”
“Sure it doesn’t,” I said. “As long as we know where camp is we’re not
lost any more. We know where we’re at. And when we get to a place where
we know where we’re at it’s a good place to stay. Deny it if you dare.
I’d rather be up here and see the camp and not be able to get there than
to be able to get there if we knew where it was but not to know where it
was.”
“Do you call that logic?” Pee-wee yelled. “It makes it all the worse to
see it.”
“Well, look the other way then,” I told him.
“There’s only one place we haven’t been to so far and that’s under the
ocean,” he said.
“Don’t get discouraged, leave it to Hervey, he’ll take us there,” I
said. “There’s a nice breeze up here. Watch out for an airplane, maybe
we’ll be rescued.”
“Were you ever in a well?” Hervey asked us.
“No, is it much fun?” I said.
He said, “It’s too slow, quicksand is better, it’s quicker. I’d like to
have a ride on a shooting star.”
“Comets are pretty good,” Garry said.
“I was never on one of those,” I said.
Pee-wee said, “The night is coming on. What are we going to do? I’m all
stiff from hanging onto this beam.”
“Let’s get down on the platform again,” Hervey said. “Follow your
leader.”
He scrambled over to the ladder and went down and we all followed him to
the gallery below. Looking out of the little window there we could see
the sun going down; it was all big and red and it made the woods all red
too away over to the west. That was where Temple Camp was. It began to
seem kind of spooky in that steeple on account of the sun going down and
everything being so quiet. The old, ramshackle houses below us, with
their roofs falling in and their windows all broken made it seem even
more lonesome where we were. Gee whiz, the woods aren’t lonesome, but
places where people used to be are lonesome.
All of a sudden Garry said, “Listen—shh.”
“It’s just those timbers creaking above us,” I said.
He said, “It sounded like a voice.”
“Well if it’s a voice up there where the bell is,” Warde said, “it
hasn’t got any body to it. I can see all around up there; I can see
inside the bell.”
Pee-wee just stared at us, “What did I tell you?” he whispered. “Voices
without bodies, those are the worst kind. I’m not going to stay up here
after dark, I’m——”
“Shh—listen,” Warde said.
“You mean away off there in the woods?” I said. “I hear that.”
“No, not that,” he said; “right above us. Listen. Hear it?”
“Kind of like murmuring?” I asked him.
“Right up there by the bell,” he said.
We all stood stark still, listening. Maybe that bell was thirty or forty
feet above us. Just as plain as could be I could hear a sort of
murmuring up there. I can’t tell you what it was like, but anyway it
wasn’t the timbers creaking or anything like that. It was like a voice.
But nobody was up there. It was kind of like _H-l-l-l_.
Gee whiz, it gave me the shudders to listen to it.