“I calc’late we will,” says he. “Got it r-rigged so we could.”
He took us up-stairs to the balcony and showed us how he had made a weight of an old piece of iron pipe. When we wanted to pull up the bridge all we had to do was hook it to a loop in the rope and drop it off the balcony. Mark said it was heavy enough to lift the bridge alone, but that if we were in a hurry we could pull too and yank her up in jiffy.
“And now,” says he, “l-let’s eat.”
The rest of us were willing enough, and while I built a fire the others went to peeling potatoes and one thing and another. We had flapjacks, too. Mark had learned how to fry them in a pan and flip them over in the air just like a regular camp cook. Whee! but they were good. We ate till there wasn’t even a streak of batter in the bottom of the dish.
“Where do we sleep?” Binney wanted to know.
“S-same place,” says Mark.
“Goin’ to set watches?”
“Sure.”
We went to bed in the dark again, for we hadn’t been able to get any lights. Mark took the first watch. Not a thing happened, he told me when he woke me up. My watch was just the same—not even a suspicious sound, and it was the same with Plunk and Binney. All that night the fellow who owned the Turk dagger, if that’s what it was, gave us a rest. It made me sort of hope he’d gone away.
“We’ve got to begin thinking about Mr. Ames’s fish,” says Mark in the morning. “Two of us better fish till noon, while the other two watch camp.”