“Hush yourself! don’t you hear it?”
Lyddy did. Surely that was a strange clinking noise to be heard up here in the woods. It sounded like a milkman going along the street carrying a bunch of empty bottles.
“It’s no wild animal–unless he’s got glass teeth and is gnashing ’em,” giggled ’Phemie. “Come on! I want to know what it means.”
“I wouldn’t, ’Phemie—”
“Well, I would, Lyddy. Come on! Who’s afraid of bottles?”
“But is it bottles we hear?”
“We’ll find out in a jiff,” declared her younger sister, leading the way deeper into the woods.
The sound was from up stream. They followed the noisy brook for some hundreds of yards. Then they came suddenly upon a little hollow, where water dripped over a huge boulder into another still pool–but smaller than the swimming hole.
Behind the drip of the water was a ledge, and on this ledge stood a row of variously assorted bottles. A man was just setting several other bottles on the same ledge.
These were the bottles the girls had heard striking together as the man walked through the woods. And the man himself was Professor Spink.