He turned to Bill. “What do you think of it?” he asked. “Is the kid telling the truth?”
“If he ain’t,” says Bill, “he’s a good one. I never see a kid look more like he was tellin’ the truth.”
“Who’s been around here besides you two boys?”
“Nobody I know of,” I told him, “except you two.”
“Cross your heart,” says he; “haven’t you seen anybody else?”
“Not a soul,” I says, and made a cross-mark over the front of me.
“If that engine ever was in the cave,” Bill put in, “it must be somewheres around here. It was there when we came, and it can’t have got away far. We’ve been watchin’ perty careful, you know.”
“That’s right. It would have been mighty hard to cart it off without our seeing them. But it’s gone, just the same,” he says.
“What’s these things?” Bill asked me, kicking at the lengths of sapling Mark had cut. They were about two feet long and there were three or four of them.
“I dunno,” I told him. “Maybe Mark cut them for a fire.”