kept thinking that maybe he'd go away by himself and get into
some harm. I kept thinking about how he said, "I want to be alone by
myself," and he'd feel that way even more now, on account of the
disgrace.

I said, "Poor little Skinny, I wish we had him along."

"He's with Uncle Jeb most likely," Bert said. "Wonder what the old man
thinks about it? Ever look into those gray eyes of his?"

"You never catch Uncle Jeb saying anything till he's sure," I said,
"and even then, it takes him a couple of minutes to get his pipe out of
his mouth. He says when you aim always aim as if you had only one
bullet and it was the last one in the world."

"That's him all right," Bert said.

"Well, there's no good worrying," I told him; "we'll just get back as
soon as we can."

"What do you say we row across and cut through Nick's Valley?" Bert
asked, "It's shorter."

"I'm game," I said, "the quicker the sooner."

"We can follow the old creek bed," he said. "Know where that is, don't
you?"

I said, "Believe me, the only bed I know anything about is the one I
sleep in. I don't see how you find out so many things, especially as
you were never here before."

"Oh, I like to just prowl around," he said, "that's the way with
tigers."

"I notice you always have a stick, too," I said.

He said, "Sure a stick's good company. I just root around with it."

"This is my third season here," I said, "and I never even heard about
any old creek bed. I never heard about Nick's Valley either."

"Guess you never talked much with the old farmers, hey?" he asked.

We rowed across the lake to Nick's Cove (I knew all about that, because
it was where the campers were and besides I knew about it anyway). If
you will look on the map you'll see it and you'll notice how there are
mountains there--kind of two sets of mountains with a space between. I
made that map so you could see just how everything happened, because,
believe me, we were going to have _some_ adventure. Only we didn't know
it.

We rowed way up into the end of Nick's Cove and pulled the skiff part
way up on shore. One thing I noticed and that was that some of the
trees around there stood in the water. I knew that was on account of
the lake being swollen, because there had been so much rain lately.
Even over at Temple Camp the water was up to the spring-board, so that
when we jumped on it, it splashed right into the lake.

"Cove is pretty big after all the rain," Bert said. And the