We started off and drove along slow, because Binney’s horse couldn’t be made to go any faster, past where the cave is and on around the bend of the river where the banks get flatter and flatter until they are a sort of marsh with the river flowing through the middle of it. I guess the road must be a quarter of a mile from the water along there. We must have driven four or five miles, and I know I’d never been so far along this road before. It was like seeing a new country, and we pretended we were explorers and had to keep a lookout for savages and wild animals and such things. Mark was great for that kind of games; and, for a fact, when you got interested in them they were a lot of fun. You could come pretty close to imagining the things really were happening that you were imagining were happening.
“There’s a house,” said Mark, pointing. “Looks like the chief lived there. Maybe we can make friends with him; or maybe there’s gold piled up there that we can g-git away with.”
“There’ll be guards hangin’ around with bows and arrers and spears,” Plunk objected. “They’ll up and stick us full of holes before we can wink.”
“Seems like I hear one of them savage war-drums a-beatin’,” says Binney. “Maybe he’s gatherin’ together his army to make an ambush for us.”
“We better go cautious. Tallow, you sneak ahead like a scout to see we don’t run into no trap.”
I got out and went slinking along by the side of the road, keeping hidden as much as I could in the bushes. After a minute I passed an orchard and came to an evergreen hedge. I poked up my head, cautious-like, and looked over. I never saw a yard with so many evergreens in it, all trimmed in funny shapes and sticking up everywhere. They were so close together you couldn’t see anything of the house but the roof. I watched quite a spell, but I couldn’t see anybody moving, so I sneaked back and reported that we weren’t being watched.
Mark called a council of war, and we decided to go ahead in a body, the real object being to get a drink of water, but we made believe we were after the chief’s gold. Just like Indians we wormed and squirmed along to the hedge and poked our way through where a bush had died out. It was a close squeeze for Mark, and he got scratched up considerable, but he got through just the same. Right off we began prowling around among all those evergreens, getting closer and closer to the house. We were all so interested in the game we clean forgot about the water and everything else.
At last we were crouching behind two bushes not more than ten feet from the steps. Mark raised his hand and pointed around one side of the house, motioning for Plunk and Binney to reconnoiter that way while he and I would go the other way. At that we rushed sudden from our cover to the corners of the house and went spying around, peeking in the windows, looking for savages or signs of the gold. At one window in the wing Mark stopped and looked careful. He waited for me to come along and pointed. I peeked in and saw that the room was all fixed up for somebody to do mechanical drawing. There were the same kind of tables and drawing boards and instruments the engineer had who built the city waterworks in Wicksville. But everything was new, you could see that, and hadn’t ever been used.
“Funny thing to be in a chief’s wigwam,” I whispered, and he nodded. He sat down with his back against the foundation and with his chin in his hands, the way he always does when he wants to figure out something he doesn’t understand. I could see he was puzzled about the drawing things way out there in that farmhouse, and if I left him alone he’d sit there maybe an hour trying to fit sort of an answer to it.
“Come on,” I whispered. “No tellin’ when these savages’ll come rampagin’ back. Let’s git out of this.”