“What,” says I, “if they come to this pile for grub—and what if they notice how we’ve piled up boxes.”
“They won’t,” says Catty, but he said it more like he hoped so than as if he thought so.
It wasn’t more than ten minutes later when a mate or somebody came along with a gang of men, three or four, and stopped.
“This pile of chuck,” says he, “has got to be moved. They’ll be digging here before the day’s over. You men get to shifting it over to the northeast corner there. Clean it up, and then spread the tarpaulin over it again.... On the job, now.”
Nice, wasn’t it? And there we were roosting right in the middle. I know how it feels to be inside of a banana and have somebody strip the peeling off. It isn’t a comfortable sensation. They would go ahead and just move the walls from around us, and there we’d be left as big as life and twice as natural. And then somebody might get curious to know what we were doing there. Somebody was almost sure to get curious about it.
“Catty,” says I, “the mutineers will guess we’ve been here all night, and that boss mutineer will know we overheard his plotting—and then what?”
“Then,” says Catty, “it will be up to us to do something pretty slick to escape. The heroes always escape somehow.”
“I wish,” says I, “you’d be real quick and think up how these heroes are going to escape. I’ve a feeling in my bones that it’ll take a slicker scheme than usual.”
“If we only had some hollow pipes about two feet long,” says Catty.
“Then what?”