it’s lucky the schools had been closed for two weeks on account of a diphtheria scare, for it’s hard to see how we could have got along if it hadn’t been that way. we had a whole week before us yet, and if we couldn’t get back mr. tidd’s turbine in seven days we couldn’t get it back at all. but we didn’t lose any time just because we had a little of it on hand. mark tidd was no time-loser.
next morning he got me out of bed ’most as early as if it was the fourth of july, and lugged me off down to my boat.
“we hain’t a-goin’ to row all the way up there again, i hope,” i says, because there were blisters on my hands, and my back was stiff, and, anyhow, rowing ten miles or so is a joke i don’t like to have played on me every day hand-running.
“we’ll just row as far as the c-c-cave,” mark says. “then we’ll git sammy to row the rest of the way.”
“oh,” says i, “sammy. what good’ll sammy be, i’d like to know. might as well fetch along the perkinses’ jersey calf.”
“sammy kin lift,” says mark. “how’d you figger we was goin’ to git the turbine out of the house? whistle to it and have it follow us like a d-d-dog?”
i didn’t have anything more to say. i might have known he wouldn’t take sammy without some good reason.
“it’s quite a heft even for sammy,” i told him.
“he’s got to carry it.”
we rowed up the river again and landed near the cave. sammy was there, all right, because his fire was smoldering, so we climbed up the hill and hollered at him. he came sticking his big head out of the opening and grinned at us like he was tickled to death to see us, which most likely he was, and says, “nice fish—bass. so big. sammy fry in pan, quick. sammy good cook.”
“we ain’t got time to eat to-day, sammy,” i told him; and he looked as disappointed as a baby that didn’t get the candy somebody promised it.
“we got to go up the river in my boat,” i says, quick, “and we want you to come along.”
he grinned again, and all his teeth showed as white as polished pebbles. “catch fish, maybe, eh? good boys, big friends to poor sammy. sammy show where to catch fish—big fish.”
“not to catch fish this time. you tell him, mark.”
“we want you to help us, sammy. some men have taken father’s engine, and we got to git it back. they’re b-b-bad men, sammy, and they might hurt us. and there’s a dog.”
he grinned wider than ever. “sammy take dog—so.” he showed us with his big hands how he’d grab the dog and throw it far enough to bust its neck—and i bet he could have done it, too. “bad men take engine, eh? um! sammy git it back. no ’fraid of bad men. sammy big, very big. bad men afraid of sammy, eh? sammy scare bad men so they keel over flipflop.”
i thought likely batten might keel over flipflop if he met sammy on a dark night, and somehow it made me feel better about the whole thing. sammy was big. why, it would have taken all of batten and willis and half of the dog to make another like him—and then sammy could have licked the fellow they went to make up.
“got boat?” he asked.
we pointed down to the river, and he nodded. “sammy git ready. fetch pan to cook, and fish-lines. maybe stay long, eh? maybe git hungry. good boys feed sammy—now sammy feed good boys—maybe, eh?”
he put a couple of pans and a bundle of other stuff into the boat, and then without our hinting at it at all he took the oars; and the way he sent that boat skimming up-stream made me ashamed of the way mark and i had gone the day before. he seemed to take it easy, too, like it wasn’t work at all, but play.
we got to the little island—maybe there was a couple of acres in it, all told—and sammy stopped rowing a minute. “bad,” he said, pointing to it and scowling. “very bad little island. boys keep off—always. don’t never go on island.”
“what’s the matter with it?” i wanted to know.
“snakes, big snakes! lay in deep grass and go k-r-r-r-r-r with tails.” he imitated a rattler so i ’most jumped out of the boat. it sounded as if one was right there under my legs all ready to strike.
“oh, rattlesnakes.”
he nodded two or three times. “heaps, many. bad place. and snakes not all—poison ivy. boys, stay away.”
“you bet we will,” says mark.
the island didn’t look like much of a place to land, anyhow, snakes or no snakes. it was low, with more bushes than trees on it, though there were quite a few butternuts and some whopping willows. it looked marshy and soggy, and i calculated we could get our feet wet most anywhere except, perhaps, right in the middle, where the butternuts were thickest.
mark showed sammy where to land over by the old rail fence, and when we got ashore mark drew out his map that he’d made the night before and showed it to us. sammy looked at it with his eyes bulging out like blue robin’s eggs—only bigger.
“fat boy make map, eh? he make river, house, barn, trees?”
mark admitted it, and it didn’t take half an eye to see he was pretty proud of his work. sam patted him on the back and grinned like he thought the map was wonderful and mark was wonderful, too, and that didn’t make marcus aurelius fortunatus tidd feel small or mean. he never minded being admired a bit.
“it’s a good map, all right,” i says, impatient-like, because it wasn’t any fun squatting down there in the muck, “but how’s it going to help us git back the engine?”
“tallow,” says mark, looking at me like he was sorry to see such ignorance in anybody, “we got to have a map. how we goin’ to plan our campaign without? tell me that. this is like a battle,” says he, “and battles is planned out ahead with m-m-maps.”
“maybe so,” says i, “but if i was general of this army i’d be stirrin’ around willis’s, i would. i guess i know the way around there pretty well without any map.”
“well,” he says, disgusted as could be, “come on, then.”
he folded the map and stuffed it in his pocket. i started to climb the bank first and was half-way up before mark or sammy were on their feet at all. i wasn’t cautious about it like i ought to have been, and went sticking my head right up in sight without ever spying around to see if everything was safe and clear. it served me right. i stuck my head over the top of the bank, and was hauling the rest of my body after, when i looked up, and there, looking at me kind of surprised, stood henry c. batten.
“well,” says he, “where’d you come from?”
i was struck all in a heap, but i knew i had to do something to keep mark and sammy from popping into sight and to keep batten from walking over to look down where they were. i reckon i looked scared. but i took hold of myself and sort of whispered in my own ear that now was the time to do some quick thinking and quick acting. i grinned at batten. it’s always a good plan to grin when you can’t think of anything else. folks like to be grinned at. i grinned like i was tickled to death to see him, and says, “have you heard any frogs a-hollering around here?”
i didn’t wait for him to answer, but jumped up in the road and walked across to him. i didn’t want him coming over to me and looking down the bank.
“frogs,” says he, “i should say i had heard some. that marsh is alive with ’em.”
“i ain’t been able to git near one in a mile,” says i. “i kin git a nickel a dozen for them down to the hotel.”
“how d’you get ’em?” he wanted to know.
“whallop ’em with a club. i got to git a new one, too. a longer one with a knob on the end of it. guess i can cut one off ’n that hick’ry yonder.”
there was a big hickory about a hundred feet off, and i started for it, and of course he came following along. it’s a funny thing, but folks always will follow like that. just meet a man or a boy or a woman and point to something and say you’re going to do something or other to it, and he’ll come mogging along as interested as if you were a balloon ascension.
“gimme a boost up,” i says.
he helped me and i got hold of the lower limb and was up in a minute. it was a smooth-bark hickory, and good clubs were growing all over it. it was a regular club tree. i got out my knife and began sawing away at a limb. it was hard cutting, but i got it off pretty soon and dropped it down on the ground. i came down after it, and trimmed it up, talking to henry c. batten all the time.
“summer boarder?” i asked him, looking at his clothes.
he grinned. “well, something like that,” he admitted. “i guess, seeing the time of year it is, that i’m a spring boarder.”
i laughed fit to split. there ain’t a better way of getting on the blind side of a man than to ’most laugh yourself sick when he makes a joke. i did my duty nobly, if i do say it myself, and it wasn’t much of a joke to laugh at, either.
“who you spring-boardin’ with?” i snickered; and then i made a sort of joke of my own. “that sounds like you was stoppin’ at a swimmin’-hole, don’t it? spring-boardin’?”
he laughed, and after that i wasn’t worrying much. if ever you get in a tight place with a man just laugh at something funny he says and make him laugh at something funny you say, and the worry’s over. somehow you can’t get to suspecting a fellow you’ve been laughing with.
“where d’you live?” he asked me.
i jerked my thumb over my shoulder. “back there a piece,” i said, which was true, all right. but it was quite a piece—five miles or more.
when i was done trimming my frog club i shut my jack-knife and, when batten wasn’t looking, dropped it on the ground near the tree where i knew i could find it again. then we started to walk up the road toward willis’s.
we walked along quite a ways until we’d got so far i judged mark and sammy would have had time to get well out of sight. then i began feeling around in my pockets and looked worried. “i dropped my jack-knife somewheres,” i told him. “i bet it was under that tree.”
i felt through my pockets some more, but of course it wasn’t there. “i’m goin’ back,” i says. “that was a new knife, and i can’t afford to lose it.”
“no, i s’pose not,” he says. “well, good-by. if you get any frogs bring ’em to me at the next house. i’ll pay you ten cents a dozen for good ones.”
i didn’t wait, but started running back as if i was anxious about my knife. i was anxious, all right, but the knife hadn’t anything to do with it. by the time i got to the tree batten was out of sight around the bend of the road, so i went right to the bank and looked over. mark and sammy were gone. i whistled the ku klux klan whistle, and got an answer from out toward the river where sammy and mark had pulled the boat and hidden it in the reeds. as soon as they saw me they knew it was safe, and came pulling in to the rail fence again.
“whe-e-ew!” i called, “but that was a close shave.”
mark didn’t answer anything, but after he and sammy were up in the road he said, “i been thinkin’, and what we got to do f-f-first is git rid of the dog.”
“it would be a good thing to do, all right, but he don’t look to me like an easy dog to git rid of.”
“you wait,” says mark, and winked at sammy. the big fellow grinned and pulled a whopping bass out from behind him.
“maybe dog like fish, eh? maybe he come to git fish. then sammy catch him, so. dogs like sammy—never hurt sammy.”
“maybe,” i said; “but this don’t look like a friendly dog.”
sammy only grinned.
we sneaked up toward willis’s through the bushes and hid in the orchard like we did before. there wasn’t anything to do but wait, so we waited. the dog wasn’t in sight anywhere. we sat there maybe an hour, when mister dog came stretching and yawning out of the barn and walked through the yard to the front gate. sammy, still grinning all over his great, round face, crept on all fours along the rail fence and got out in the road. we stayed where we were because we couldn’t help any that we could see, and, anyhow, the idea of fooling with that dog didn’t hold out any inducements. i got a grip on my club and made up my mind that if he did sail into sammy i’d help all i could; but, thank goodness, it wasn’t necessary. in no time at all we saw sammy, with a rope around the dog’s neck, waiting for us at the fence.
“nice dog,” says he, when we came up. “like fish very much. give him lots of fish, maybe, eh? now what we do?”
“we’ll tie him up,” says mark. “lead him down the road far enough so he can’t be heard barkin’.”
we marched him a quarter of a mile off and tied him a rod or so back from the road in the woods.
“there,” i told him, and gave him a pat on the head, “i feel better with you here. you’re a weight off my mind, and no mistake.”
“now,” says mark, “we’ll git down to business.”
he had things planned out, all but the getting of the turbine. it looked to me like that was the important thing, but it didn’t seem to bother him very much—sort of took it for granted we’d get it out of the house, all right, but he was worried about how we’d get away to wicksville with it and without getting caught. he said the first thing to do was to take my boat up the river to willis’s and run it up through the marsh. i guess somebody there liked to fish or row or something, for they had dug out a sort of canal from the river through the marshy ground and right up to the solid bank. there was a flight of rickety steps leading up the bank, and at the bottom was a little square landing-place. what we had to do, mark said, was to get the boat to that landing, or near enough to reach, and keep it there without letting anybody see it till sammy came down the steps with the engine in his arms.
it sounded easy enough to get the boat there and hide it, but i couldn’t see, for the life of me, how we were going to get into the house and haul out a big machine without having somebody catch on.
“it’s always the hardest part,” says mark, “that’s easiest done. it’s because you try harder. the great schemes that have failed did it because somebody got m-m-mixed on a little thing.” and he told us a lot of instances out of history and stories. it looked like he had the best of the argument, but that didn’t get the engine into the boat.
