“Go ahead,” says I; “if they’re for your Dad, why I’ll help you to the bitter end.... But you promised Mr. Browning you wouldn’t go planning any plans without letting him know.”
“I’m not. I’m hunting turtles’ eggs, and if anything happens while I’m doing it, it isn’t my fault, is it?”
With that he started off along the shore, slinking like an Indian, and I was subtile, like James Fenimore Cooper says, right at his heels. We were about the most subtile pair of kids that ever were. Why, we went along so quiet we almost lost ourselves, and every once in a while I had to pinch my leg to make sure I was there. It worried me. When a fellow’s out at night that way, he don’t enjoy the feeling that he’s got lost from himself.
It was kind of spooky anyhow. Across the sand we could hear the surf breaking on the ocean side of the island, and the moonlight was a kind of sickly pale that made things look different than they really were, and the sand itself, with unlucky bushes growing once in a while, and clumps of grass, made the whole place look like almost anything disagreeable could happen there. And I bet it could.
“Go easy,” says Catty, “we may run onto them any minute.”
“Them?” says I.
“The turtle eggs,” says he, with a kind of a chuckle.
Sure enough; in a few minutes we could hear somebody talking, and we flopped down on our stomachs and wriggled along, until we could see two men. They had been digging, but now they were resting and talking it over while they sat on a pile of sand.
“I tell you this is the place,” says Mr. House. “I measured carefully, and then went all over it to be sure I hadn’t made a mistake.”
“Well, we dug all night last night, and nothing yet. They surely wouldn’t have it much deeper.”