“Now what d’you make of that?” I says.
“I don’t make n-nothin’ of it. It’s mysterious,” says Mark.
“S’pose he’s there yet, or did he sneak off?”
“Don’t know, but we ought to f-f-find out. How be you on climbin’, Plunk?”
“When folks wants to teach a monkey to climb,” says I, “they fetch it to me.”
“All right,” says he.
“Then suppose you slide b-back there and shin up that big h-hemlock. Keep out of sight on the other side of the trunk. If you kin git ’way up near the top you ought to be able to see down on top of that f-feller if he’s still there.”
I went off quiet. I’ll bet I was so quiet Mark wouldn’t have known I left if he hadn’t been watching me—like Uncas used to do. It wasn’t much of a job to climb that tree, and pretty soon I was ’way up where I could look down on all that part of the country. At first I had to kind of search around with my eyes before I got my bearings. Then I made out Mark Tidd, and started looking for the man. Sure enough, there he was laying on his stomach and taking things as comfortable as he could. He was settled there for the day, by the way things looked, and he was watching Tod Nodder.
I stayed where I was because it was a good place to be. I felt kind of high up and splendid, looking down onto the world. It give me a sort of fine kind of a feeling that I liked.
All the time I kept looking around that patch of underbrush and little trees to see if any other parties of Indians was coming along for reinforcements. I could see plain from where I was, because I was so high up I could look right down over the tops of bushes and everything. Well, pretty soon I saw something that sort of interested me. It was quite a ways behind the man, and I couldn’t make out what it was, but there was a look about it that didn’t fit, somehow. You know what I mean. Whatever it was looked as if it didn’t belong where it was. I kept watching it, and sometimes I thought it moved and sometimes I knew it didn’t move. I couldn’t make up my mind which.