We marched him a quarter of a mile off and tied him a rod or so back from the road in the woods.
“There,” I told him, and gave him a pat on the head, “I feel better with you here. You’re a weight off my mind, and no mistake.”
“Now,” says Mark, “we’ll git down to business.”
He had things planned out, all but the getting of the turbine. It looked to me like that was the important thing, but it didn’t seem to bother him very much—sort of took it for granted we’d get it out of the house, all right, but he was worried about how we’d get away to Wicksville with it and without getting caught. He said the first thing to do was to take my boat up the river to Willis’s and run it up through the marsh. I guess somebody there liked to fish or row or something, for they had dug out a sort of canal from the river through the marshy ground and right up to the solid bank. There was a flight of rickety steps leading up the bank, and at the bottom was a little square landing-place. What we had to do, Mark said, was to get the boat to that landing, or near enough to reach, and keep it there without letting anybody see it till Sammy came down the steps with the engine in his arms.
It sounded easy enough to get the boat there and hide it, but I couldn’t see, for the life of me, how we were going to get into the house and haul out a big machine without having somebody catch on.
“It’s always the hardest part,” says Mark, “that’s easiest done. It’s because you try harder. The great schemes that have failed did it because somebody got m-m-mixed on a little thing.” And he told us a lot of instances out of history and stories. It looked like he had the best of the argument, but that didn’t get the engine into the boat.
CHAPTER XIII
We waited until we thought everybody in the house would be eating dinner, and then we rowed up the shore and turned into the Willis’s cut. Nobody saw us, but we didn’t breathe easy till we were under the high bank and sheltered from the house. Of course, we weren’t safe even then, for if anybody had looked down there and seen a strange boat tied alongside the scow of Mr. Willis’s he naturally would wonder about it and want to know who came in it and where they were. Sammy fixed that part of it up pretty well by shoving the boat out a dozen feet and then throwing a big armful of brush over the bow of it. He ran the rope through the grass and left the end where we could get at it in a hurry and haul the boat in. I went up as far as I dared on the steps, and everything looked safe to me. Unless you were suspicious and looking for something you wouldn’t have noticed the boat at all.
“Tallow,” says Mark, who had been sitting on the bottom step pinching his cheek, “folks that’re scairt are easier to f-f-fool than folks that ain’t.”
“I guess so,” says I.