“I don’t think anything about it,” says I. “Now let’s git somethin’ to eat. I’m starvin’.”
CHAPTER VII
You may think it would be an easy thing to sneak out of Uncle Hieronymous’s cabin without being seen. To anybody who doesn’t know just how things were it would seem as if there wouldn’t be any trouble about it at all, but there was, just the same. In the first place, the cabin was little—only three rooms. All the door there was opened out of the back, and the two men were guarding that. On the side of the cabin at the right of the door there wasn’t a window, and there was only one at the end opposite. There were two windows on the left-hand side and one alongside the door. This was the window uncle used to feed Martha and Mary through. You see right away there were two sides we couldn’t get out of—the one with no windows in it and the one where the door was. As soon as Collins came back they fixed the back end so we couldn’t escape there, and it wasn’t any trick at all—they just nailed the window down on the outside.
“Collins n-n-never thought of that,” says Mark Tidd. “It was the f-f-fat feller.”
“Huh!” I grunted, because I knew just what he was thinking. He had it all figured out. Jiggins must be smart just because he was fat. “I guess skinny folks has some brains,” I says.
“Anyhow,” says he, “these folks have f-f-fixed it so we’re goin’ to have to use our b-b-brains to git out. Let’s think things over.”
He sat down and began pulling at his fat cheek the way he always does when he’s studying hard, and his little eyes were almost shut. But you should have seen how they twinkled—what you could see of them. The other three of us sat down and thought too, but nobody seemed to have much luck at it.
“The s-s-savages,” says Mark, “have stopped up one openin’ to this c-c-cavern.” He meant the end where Jiggins nailed down the window. “Then,” says he, “there’s nothin’ but solid rock on that s-s-side. If we g-g-git out it must be through the reg’lar openin’ [he meant the door] or over on th-th-this side. But,” says he, “they’re w-w-watchin’ there.”
Just then we heard a hammering, and when we looked there was Jiggins nailing up the windows on the left side.
Mark shook his head and acted like he was actually proud of Jiggins. “That’s what I’d ’a’ d-d-done myself,” says he. “Now we got to g-g-git out right at that end where they’re w-w-watchin’.”