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.
“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.
