hed to the barn.

This I made last. I got into it from a shed window, which I cut down
and fitted with a rough door. It went into the barn through a small
door in the corner, which was in halves, like a grist-mill door. I
opened only the lower half, and this tunnel I used mainly in bad
weather. I had only just finished it the day before the fire. It was
the day after the fire, when I was feverish for some way to get rid of
my scare, that I decided to go to work on my place of retreat in case
the town was burned.

I had thought about building something of the kind for a long while,
but could not seem to get it planned out in my mind just to suit me.
The burning of the livery stable, of course, set me thinking harder
than ever. The place had to be, of course, something that would not
burn and some place that could not be found. The only thing that
wouldn't burn was the snow, but in case of fire I knew that it would
melt for some distance from the buildings. I had just had an example
of this. Besides, there had to be a way to get into it which could not
be seen either before or after the fire, and this entrance must be
from a building so that I would not have to expose myself in going to
it. The place must also be where I could stay a few days if I had to.
A dozen times I thought I had got the whole thing planned out, and
once I wrote about it to my mother, but I always found that something
was weak about the plan somewhere. But I now concluded that I had
struck on the right thing at last.

A hundred feet back of the next building to the north of the one in
which I had my bedroom was a small barn where the man who owned the
place had kept a cow. It was so small that I always thought he must
have measured his cow, like a tailor, and built the barn to fit. Fifty
feet back (east) of this barn was a haystack. Before the snow came the
top of it had been taken off so it was left about four or five feet
high and the shape of a bowl turned wrong side up. It was in the lee
of the barn, and the snow had piled up over it in a great drift so
that you would never once have guessed that there was such a thing as
a haystack within half a mile. It was, maybe, a hundred feet from the
Headquarters barn to this stack, with four or five or more feet of
snow all the way. My idea was to tunnel from the barn to the stack,
dig out some hay on the south side and have a snug room half made of
hay and half of snow.

There was no underpinning be