Mark showed Sammy where to land over by the old rail fence, and when we got ashore Mark drew out his map that he’d made the night before and showed it to us. Sammy looked at it with his eyes bulging out like blue robin’s eggs—only bigger.
“Fat boy make map, eh? He make river, house, barn, trees?”
Mark admitted it, and it didn’t take half an eye to see he was pretty proud of his work. Sam patted him on the back and grinned like he thought the map was wonderful and Mark was wonderful, too, and that didn’t make Marcus Aurelius Fortunatus Tidd feel small or mean. He never minded being admired a bit.
“It’s a good map, all right,” I says, impatient-like, because it wasn’t any fun squatting down there in the muck, “but how’s it going to help us git back the engine?”
“Tallow,” says Mark, looking at me like he was sorry to see such ignorance in anybody, “we got to have a map. How we goin’ to plan our campaign without? Tell me that. This is like a battle,” says he, “and battles is planned out ahead with m-m-maps.”
“Maybe so,” says I, “but if I was general of this army I’d be stirrin’ around Willis’s, I would. I guess I know the way around there pretty well without any map.”
“Well,” he says, disgusted as could be, “come on, then.”
He folded the map and stuffed it in his pocket. I started to climb the bank first and was half-way up before Mark or Sammy were on their feet at all. I wasn’t cautious about it like I ought to have been, and went sticking my head right up in sight without ever spying around to see if everything was safe and clear. It served me right. I stuck my head over the top of the bank, and was hauling the rest of my body after, when I looked up, and there, looking at me kind of surprised, stood Henry C. Batten.
“Well,” says he, “where’d you come from?”
I was struck all in a heap, but I knew I had to do something to keep Mark and Sammy from popping into sight and to keep Batten from walking over to look down where they were. I reckon I looked scared. But I took hold of myself and sort of whispered in my own ear that now was the time to do some quick thinking and quick acting. I grinned at Batten. It’s always a good plan to grin when you can’t think of anything else. Folks like to be grinned at. I grinned like I was tickled to death to see him, and says, “Have you heard any frogs a-hollering around here?”