It was easy enough to get up to the rail fence that went down that side of Willis’s yard to the barn; and it was safe enough, for the fence corners were full of bushes and big weeds where we could have stayed as long as we wanted to without anybody seeing us. We didn’t come to hide in a fence corner, though.
“Well,” I says, “we’re here.”
“We’re on the wrong side of the house. What I want to do is get a p-p-peek into that room where the drawin’ things were.”
“We kin go around.”
“We got to,” says he.
“Hold on!” I says. “There ain’t no need for both of us to go trampin’ all over the place. One kin see as good as two, and if I am seen it won’t be so bad as if you were. You stay here, and I’ll go crawlin’ around and see if I can’t get a shot at that window. I bet I can get there all right.”
He thought a minute, sort of hesitating, because Mark wasn’t the kind of a fellow to let somebody run a risk he ought to run; but he saw it was the best scheme to let me go, so he nodded. “Maybe I’ll find somethin’ to do here,” he says. “Be careful.”
I went crouching along to the road, intending to go past the house under cover of the hedge that ran across in front of it. I was halfway across, I expect, before I thought of the dog. Now, I’ve found out that it is pretty easy to get around without a man seeing you; but it’s quite another thing to be so still a dog can’t hear you, and I never found anybody who could stop a good watch-dog from smelling him. But, dog or no dog, I had to look into that room, for, if Mark had guessed right, there’s where his father’s turbine would be, and nowhere else. The drawing-man would want it there to take his measurements from and to see how it went together.
I ducked past the gate as quick as I could, though there wasn’t really any need, for there were so many evergreen trees growing around in the yard that you couldn’t see the gate from the house, anyway. I’ve seen a lot of farmhouses with six or seven evergreens growing in their front yards for ornaments, but I never saw anybody who seemed to like them so well as Mr. Willis. There were more than a dozen of them, set in rows, and all trimmed and pruned into funny shapes like balls and cones and one thing and another. I was glad he did like them; it came in mighty handy for me.
There was a field of corn on the side of the house I was heading for, and it wasn’t very far up, not far enough to hide in; but there were quite a few clumps of bushes along the fence, like there always are on farms where the men that run them are shiftless. I got behind one of these and took a good look at everything to see how the land lay and to make up my mind just what to do so as to get a look through that window.