AT CRYSTAL LAKE
Uncle Toby was much surprised at what Ted called to his attention.
Turning around, as he was going toward the well, Uncle Toby looked to
where the Curlytop boy pointed. He saw the form of a man vanishing from
sight over the top of a little hill just behind the lonely cabin.
"Hello there!" cried Uncle Toby, in such loud tones that Skyrocket began
to bark fiercely. "Hello there! Who are you? What are you doing?"
The man did not stop, turn around, nor answer. Instead he ran into a
little clump of trees and was soon lost to sight. With another loud bark
Skyrocket took after him.
"Oh, don't let our dog go!" cried Jan. "Make him come back, Uncle Toby.
That man might hurt him."
"Just what I think," said Uncle Toby. "Here, Sky!" he called, for
sometimes the Curlytops' dog was given that short name. "Here, Sky! Come
back. Come back!"
Skyrocket didn't want to. He dearly loved a chase, and this man seemed
willing to run. That the man was out of sight made no difference to the
dog. Skyrocket loved a game of hide and go seek, and perhaps he thought
that was what the stranger was playing.
"Come back here, Sky!" called Uncle Toby.
"Here, Skyrocket! Here!" shouted Ted.
Janet added her voice to that of her brother and Trouble chimed in.
Perhaps all these had an effect on the dog, or he might have thought
that Uncle Toby would punish him if he did not mind. At any rate, after
a few more barks and some growls, looking meanwhile toward the clump of
trees into which the man had disappeared, the dog came back, wagging his
tail and seeming a bit disappointed.
"Who was that man, Uncle Toby?" asked Janet.
"I don't know," was the answer. "No one has lived in that cabin for
years. I guess he is some tramp who didn't have any other place to
stay."
"He didn't look like a tramp," observed Tom.
"No, his clothes weren't ragged," added Ted.
"That's so," agreed Uncle Toby. "From the little look I had of him he
wasn't very ragged. But then maybe he hasn't been a tramp very long, and
it takes quite a while to make one's clothes ragged."
"It doesn't take Trouble long!" laughed Jan. "He can go out with a good
new suit on and come back in half an hour with it all full of cuts and
holes."
"Oh, well, Trouble is different," said Uncle Toby, with a chuckle.
Uncle Toby stood for a few moments looking toward the woods into which
the strange man had run, and then, going to the well, filled the pail
with water and put some in the radiator of the automobile. After that
Uncle Toby went around to the back of the old cabin.
"Are you going to see if anybody else is there?" asked Jan, while Lola
and Mary waited with curiosity for an answer.
"Let me come and help look!" cried Ted.
"So will I!" added Tom.
"If you fellows are going I might as well go, too," said Harry.
"No, you children stay where you are," called Uncle Toby. "I'm just
going to take a look around, and then we'll go on to Crystal Lake. Stay
where you are!"
Ted, Janet, and the others remained in the automobile, waiting for Uncle
Toby to come back. Aunt Sallie was almost ready to doze off in a little
sleep when Mr. Bardeen was seen coming around the corner of the cabin.
No one was with him, and there was no further sight of the man.
"Was anybody else in there?" asked Ted.
"No one," replied Uncle Toby. "The cabin was empty as far as I could
see. I guess the man just stopped in there for shelter, and when he saw
us he thought we owned the place and ran out."
"Who does own it?" asked Tom.
"It belongs to a lumberman named Newt Baker," answered Uncle Toby. "He
used to stay here in the summer, and sometimes part of the winter. But
he went away and since then no one has lived here--except that tramp,"
he added with a laugh. "Poor man," he went on, "I hope he finds some
place to stay this winter. It looks as if it might be a hard one from
the early snow we had."
Once more they started off; and a little later, nothing more having
happened, they arrived safely at Crystal Lake.
"Oh, what a fine place!" cried Tom Taylor, as he saw the big body of
water, on the shore of which was perched Uncle Toby's cottage. The lake
was not frozen, except with a "skim" of ice here and there in little
coves.
"It would be lovely in summer for picnics," said Lola. Neither she nor
her brother had been to Crystal Lake before, but the Curlytops had
visited it once or twice with Uncle Toby, though they had almost
forgotten.
"Well, here we are, children!" called Uncle Toby, as he stopped the
automobile near his "shack" as he often called it. "Now if you'll see
that they get safely inside, Aunt Sallie, I'll soon be with you and
we'll look after supper and get the beds ready."
"I not goin' to bed now!" cried Trouble. "I not goin' to bed now! I
goin' to stay up an' see--an' see--Santa C'aus!" he burst out, after a
moment of thought.
"Oh, you little tyke!" laughed Lola, catching him up in her arms. "Santa
Claus won't be here for over a month."
"And you don't have to go to bed right away," added Janet.
Out of the auto piled the boys and girls, Skyrocket scrambling ahead of
them to smell around and find out what sort of place this was that he
had been brought to.
As Aunt Sallie, the Curlytops and their playmates went toward the front
door of the cabin, the door was opened and a smiling man looked out.
"Hello, folks!" he called. "I've got it good and warm for you, though it
isn't as cold as it was." He was the man Uncle Toby had engaged to start
the fires and to have everything in readiness for the coming of the
Curlytops.
"Well, we're glad to get here, Jim Nelson," said Aunt Sallie, for she
knew the man.
Uncle Toby put the car in the barn and came in with some of the boxes
and bundles that had been piled in the automobile--bundles of clothes
and things for the children.
"Well, you got here all right, I see," remarked Jim Nelson. "Have any
trouble on the way?"
"Not to amount to anything," answered Uncle Toby. "Funny thing, though,
down at Newt Baker's cabin. I stopped there to get some water from his
deep well. And as I got near the cabin a man ran out and down the hill."
"A man!" exclaimed Mr. Nelson, while the children listened to the talk.
"I didn't know anybody was living there."
"There isn't--that is, not living there regularly," said Uncle Toby.
"But a man ran out. I took him for a tramp at first, only he wasn't
ragged. But after he ran away I went and looked in."
"What did you see?" asked Mr. Nelson, and this the Curlytops and others
wished to hear about.
"Well, it looked as if he'd been living there and doing his cooking for
some time," went on Uncle Toby. "There were a lot of tin cans and odds
and ends of loaves of bread, cracker crumbs, and the like on the table
in the kitchen. Looked to me as if this man had been camping out in Newt
Baker's shack."
"Very likely," said Mr. Nelson. "I don't like such characters hanging
around Crystal Lake. We'll have to keep watch for him. If there are
tramps around they may take things. As a matter of fact, food and little
comforts of small value have been taken from some of the cottages and
camps. Fred Tuller's son Tom wrote to the Pocono paper and made a whale
of a story out of it. But from what you say the matter may be of more
importance than we thought. At any rate, we'd better look into it."
"We'll keep a lookout, then," said Uncle Toby. "And I'll take another
run down to the cabin some day, after I get the Curlytops settled here
having fun," and he laughed at the boys and girls so they would not be
afraid of the talk of tramps and men who might take things.
Mr. Nelson left a little after this, promising to come over the next day
to see how they were.
Then came busy times in Uncle Toby's cabin at Crystal Lake. Aunt Sallie
and the three girls got ready the supper, while the boys opened boxes
and bundles. Skyrocket ran about here and there, poking his nose into
everything, and Trouble was almost as bad, for he, too, wanted to see
everything that was going on.
At last, however, things began to get "straightened out," as the
Curlytops' mother would have said, and they sat down to a fine supper.
Every one had a good appetite, even Skyrocket, who had gnawed clean the
bone Uncle Toby got him at the butcher shop.
"Let's play hide and go seek before we go to bed," proposed Jan, as they
sat about the open fireplace in the big living room after supper.
"Will it be all right?" asked Mary.
"Will what be all right?" Jan wanted to know.
"I mean won't your uncle be mad if we play in his house?" went on Mary.
"Oh, dear no!" laughed Jan. "That's what he brought us up here for;
didn't you, Uncle Toby?"
"Didn't I what, Jan?" he asked, for he had been talking to Aunt Sallie
about the beds.
"Didn't you bring us up here so we could have a good time?"
"Of course I did!" exclaimed Mr. Bardeen. "What do you want to do now?"
"Play hide and go seek. May we?"
"Yes, go ahead. Run about as much as you please, but don't get hurt.
There isn't any fancy furniture here to break."
This was true, for everything in the cabin at Crystal Lake was heavy and
strongly made to stand rough handling. So the children could do no harm
racing about the cabin.
Soon a merry game was in progress, even Trouble taking part, though he
could hardly be said to play it right. His idea was to hide and keep on
yelling for some one to come and find him, his voice easily telling
where he was. The only thing to be done in his case was to pretend not
to know where he was, even if one saw him. This always made Trouble
scream with delight, and he would say, over and over again:
"You couldn't find me, could you?"
And of course they always said they couldn't, though they could if they
had wished.
So the game went on, Trouble taking his part in it. Finally came the
turn of Mary to "blind," and as she covered her face and began to count
slowly, the others tiptoed into the different rooms to hide. The cabin
was built on the bungalow style, with a number of rooms on the first
floor, and there were many fine hiding places.
Janet went into a room at the far end of the cabin, a room that no one,
so far during the evening, had entered. It was where Uncle Toby was
going to sleep.
"No one will find me here," thought Janet, as she crouched down behind a
chair near one of the windows. She looked through the glass, and dimly
saw the dark forest all around the cabin. "No one will think of coming
here," said Janet to herself.
She cuddled herself into as small a nook as possible down behind the
chair, in a place where she could look out through the other rooms and
could see the lamplight and firelight in the big living apartment.
It was in this living apartment that Mary was counting with her eyes
shut and soon she would call: "Ready or not I'm coming!" Then she would
walk around and try to find the hiding ones.
"But she won't find me," thought Janet, "and I can get in home free."
From the distance Janet heard Mary say she was coming, and then suddenly
the little girl was startled by a tapping on the window just back of
the chair behind which she was hiding.
At first Janet thought it was the brushing of some tree branch against
the glass that had made the tapping sound. But when it came again,
several times, and very regular, the little girl knew some hand must be
doing it.
"Maybe Tom or Ted has gone outside and is trying to scare me," thought
Janet. "I'll take a peep and see."
Slowly she raised herself up from her crouching position behind the
chair. And then the tapping sound on the glass came again. Janet looked
out and gave a scream as, looking in through the window, she saw the
face of a man on which the moon faintly shone.