“Well?” says Mr. Whiteley, pretty impatient. “Well?”
“Come on,” says Mark. He led them to the cave and pointed in. “We got it back,” says he, “and put it in there. Then along came those men, chasin’ after us, and we had to fight them off. I was sure they’d beat us sooner or later and git back the engine, so when Tallow was off scoutin’ I hid it.”
“Um!” says I. “How?”
“Easy,” says he. “I cut some rollers to put under it and tied a rope around it. It wasn’t hard to haul it along then. All I did was to drag it out to the edge of that gully”—he pointed—“and let it over the edge slow, hangin’ onto the rope so it wouldn’t slip.” That was what those lengths of sapling were.
We walked over and looked into the washout, but there wasn’t any engine; nothing but a heap of rocks.
“It’s under there,” says Mark. “I piled those stones over it as careful as could be, and then s-s-smoothed out the sand so nobody could tell I’d been around there. And there’s your engine!”
Father and Mr. Whiteley couldn’t say very much after that, but they kept on being stern out of principle, like grown folks do. They had to thaw out some, though.
“How’d you do it?” Uncle Ike wanted to know.
“They can tell us goin’ back,” says Mr. Whiteley. “Mr. and Mrs. Tidd don’t know they’re found yet.”
Together we got the turbine out and up the hill and onto Uncle Ike’s wagon. Then we set out for town.