, yes, it won't move till May first." "Thank goodness for
that," I told him.

I guess maybe you'd better look at the map now, hey? It isn't much of a
map, but you should worry. If you don't take a good look at it, pretty
soon you won't know where you're at. I guess you can squint out the
valley between the mountains. That's Nick's Valley, everything around
there belonged to old Nick. If he didn't own the moon, it was because
he couldn't reach it.

Now, that's just where we went through, see? And it was all full of
puddles--young lakes. I couldn't draw them with a pencil, but they were
there. I can prove it, because I got my feet wet. Pretty soon Bert
said, "Here's where you ought to have your scout staff with you," and
just then I stumbled down among a lot of brush.

"Now you're in it," he said.

"In what?" I asked him.

"In the bed," he said.

"You call this a bed?" I asked him, "I like a brass bed better."

"If you'd only had your staff, you could have felt ahead."

"I can feel a head now," I told him, "and it's got a good bump on it."

"Well," he said, "you're right in the hollow where the old creek used
to flow. Let's push along through it a little ways and see what we can
dig up."

You couldn't see that it was a hollow just looking at it, but you had
to go down into it and then you knew. It was all grown up with bushes
and we just went along through it, the same as if we were pushing
through a jungle. All of a sudden I felt something crunch under my
foot, and when I picked it up, I saw it was a fish's backbone.

"See," Bert said, "what did I tell you?"

It seemed funny to be squirming our way along where a creek used to
flow before it changed its mind and decided to flow into Bowl Valley.
"Maybe it changed its mind and made the lake because it knew the scouts
were coming, hey?" I asked. "That was a good turn."

"It was a good _long_ turn," he said. "And nobody around here seems to
know anything about this old creek bottom. We just stumbled into it the
same as you did. That's some bump you've got."

"Sure, my topography is changed," I told him.

He said, "Old Nick fought in the Revolutionary War. He owned all this
land around here right through to the lake--I mean Bowl Valley. His
house was at the bottom of Bowl Valley."

"What do you say we fish it up some day?" I asked him.

"All this was his farm," Bert said. "See that old silo there? I guess
that's what it was, or something like it."

"May