“Looks so, but you n-n-never can tell.” He opened it up, and it wasn’t anything but a sheet of a letter. The writing began right in the middle of a sentence where the man who wrote it had finished one page and started another. I looked over Mark’s shoulder and read it.
“—peculiar old codger,” it said. “You’ll have to be careful how you handle him. He’ll smell a mouse if you don’t step pretty softly, and then the fat will be in the fire. You haven’t the description of the land, so here it is. Keep it safely, and bring back a deed. It will be the best day’s work you ever did.” Then came some letters and figures that we didn’t understand, but we did understand them later. They looked mysterious and like a cipher code—“The S. 40 of the N. W. ¼ of Sec. 6, Town 1 north, R. 4 west.” Then the letter was signed by a man named Williams J. Partlan.
“Wonder what it means?” I asked.
“Dun’no’,” says Mark. “Guess I’ll s-s-save it and find out.”
Now, that was just like Mark. He didn’t just wonder what these letters and figures meant and then throw away the paper; he saved it so he could study it out or ask somebody who could explain it to him. He was the greatest fellow for looking into things he couldn’t understand you ever heard of.
It was hot and dusty, and pretty soon it began to get dark. First I knew Mark began slumping over against me until he almost squeezed me out of the seat, and then he began to snore. I poked him with my elbow, but it didn’t do any good. Once Mark Tidd gets to sleep it would take more than my elbow to wake him up. I bet he’d have slept right through the wreck and been picked out of it without ever missing a snore. After a while the conductor came through and called “Baldwin. Change for Manistee, Traverse City, and Petoskey.” At that I had to wake Mark, so I put my mouth close to his ear and hollered. He lifted a big fat hand and tried to brush me away like I was a fly. I hollered again and poked him a good one in the ribs. He grunted this time, and with another poke and a holler he half opened his eyes and wiggled his head from one side to the other like he was displeased about something.
“We’re coming to Baldwin,” said I. “Wake up.”
“I d-d-don’t care,” says he, stuttering like anything, “if we’re c-c-comin’ to Jericho with the walls a-tumblin’ down.”
But in a minnit he roused up, and as soon as he really got it through his head what was going on he was as wide awake as anybody.
After a little the train stopped at Baldwin, and we scrambled out, lugging our suit-cases. Out of the tail of my eye I saw Mr. Collins getting off, too. Well, sir, we got off at a little depot, smaller than the one at Wicksville. Down a little piece was a building with lights on it, and that was all. There wasn’t any town that we could see, nothing but the two buildings.