n, sure
enough, he looked around and broke a branch off a tree and pulled the
twigs off it. "That'll do to poke around with," he said, "now come
ahead."

"You and your stick are like Uncle Jeb and his pipe," I told him.

He said, "Now we'll wend our way through old Nick's Valley. It'll bring
us right out near the old creek bed. Then we can follow that right down
to the river. That's the way Skinny did, but I guess he just stumbled
through that way. Ever hear of old Nick?"

"Only on account of the name, Nick's Cove," I said; "is he dead?"

"Oh, very much dead," he said; "he died about a hundred years ago.
Didn't you know he was dead?"

"Believe _me_, I never even knew he was sick," I told him.

Then he said, "Well, from all I can learn, old Nick owned all the land
for miles around here, and he lived at the bottom of Black Lake."

"Good night," I said, "if I owned as much land as that, I wouldn't live
at the bottom of a lake."

"Kind of damp, huh?" he asked; "but you see Black Lake wasn't here
then."

"Where was it?" I asked him.

"Well it just wasn't," he said; "it was dry land. The way I make it
out, it was Bowl Valley, and old Nick lived right down in the bottom of
Bowl Valley. There's an old woman on the Berry Creek road who smokes a
clay pipe. She's about a hundred years old. She told me all about it.
People around here can't even tell you where Bowl Valley was. They
don't know what you're talking about when you mention such a place. I
dug up a whole lot of stuff about it. Old Nick's got descendants living
around here now, and they don't even know about it."

"But you found out," I said.

"That's because I'm an old tramp," he said, laughing sort of; "I like
to sit up on barnyard fences and chin with old wives--whenever I can
manage to get away from my patrol."

"Gee, I don't blame them for not letting you get away from them," I
said.

All the while we were hiking it along between the mountains and it was
pretty wet in some places, because it was a low valley we were in.

"Now this is Nick's Valley," Bert said; "it's all full of puddles, hey?
Look out for your feet. This will bring us out at the old creek bed and
we can follow that down to the Hudson. Look at that fish, will you? A
killie, huh? Washed away in here. Some rains!" He poked a little killie
out from under some grass with his stick--honest, that fellow never
missed anything. "Sometimes I root out the funniest kinds of insects
you ever sa