Sure enough, there was the frying-pan with grease sticking to the bottom, and we never left it that way.
“Wonder who it could have been?” says Plunk.
“Maybe it was Uncle Ike,” guessed Binney.
“No,” says Mark, “he’d ’a’ cleaned the pan.”
That was right. We knew he wouldn’t leave any dirty dishes around.
Well, it kind of upset us. Of course, the cave wasn’t ours, and anybody could come into it that wanted to, but nobody ever did. It was such a little cave that it didn’t amount to much to look at, and it was quite a climb; and now here was somebody poking into our things, and it made us pretty sore.
“Probably some feller come along fishin’ and happened onto it,” Binney guessed.
It didn’t do any good to bother about it, so we set to work and packed our things away and got a fire ready to light. In front of the cave was a little patch of sand—white sand crumbled off the sandstone that the cave was carved out of, I guess—and it was there we had our fires and did our cooking. Mark always fixed the fires, because he knew how to pile the sticks and get them to blazing even if the wind was blowing like sixty. Now he was crouched down ready to strike a match when all of a sudden he said something like he was startled.
“What’s matter?” I asked him.
He didn’t answer, but bent over and looked at something in the sand. Somehow I felt shivery all at once without any reason, and walked over where he was to see what he was looking at. There in the sand was some kind of a footprint; it was a bare foot, but big, bigger than two ordinary men’s feet, with the toes growing sort of sideways. I looked at Mark, and he looked at me.