We got home with our fish just as Plunk and Binney were getting ready to eat. They had cooked dinner and waited for us until they couldn’t stand it any longer. Mark and I were perfectly ready to begin, too.
After lunch we made a live-box to keep our fish in. It wasn’t a first-class live-box, but it was enough to keep the fish from getting away. We made it by piling stones in the water close to the kitchen door, and when it was done we took our fish off the string and dumped them in. One was dead and one wasn’t very lively, but the others seemed as good as new. We skinned the dead one and the poorly one and rubbed salt on them to have for supper. Binney and Plunk pretty nearly let their eyes pop out when they saw Mark’s big bass.
“Guess that’ll pay our rent for a week to Mr. Ames,” says Plunk.
“Hope he’ll enjoy eatin’ it as m-m-much as I did catchin’ it,” says Mark.
“What’ll we do this afternoon?” Plunk wanted to know.
Mark wrinkled up his nose and squinted. “Seems to me,” says he, “that we d-d-don’t know as much about this hotel as we ought to. L-let’s explore it from cellar to garret. If anybody’s got a hidin’-place here we want to find out about it.”
That did seem like common sense, so we all turned around and went into the office. From there we climbed the main stairs to the second floor and then to the third floor.
Well, sir, we went through every room on that floor, and every room on the second floor and every room on the first floor, and from one to the other of the basement, and not a sign did we see of anybody. More than that, we didn’t see anything to show that anybody had been there for half a dozen years. There was plenty of dirt and rubbish and cobwebs, but that was all. It made you feel sort of spooky, especially when you knew somebody had been there, and most likely had been living there some place for goodness knows how long. Mark Tidd looked pretty glum. Somehow, not finding anything seemed to upset him more than as if we had run on to something we didn’t want to find. He didn’t say a word, but just walked off to a corner of the porch and sat down. Pretty soon he began to whittle, and we knew that something would be happening shortly. Whittling is about the last resort for Mark Tidd. When everything else fails he sits down and whittles. Let him whittle for half an hour, and you can bet something will come of it.
While he was whittling I walked over to take a look at the big fish in the live-box. I could see the smaller ones, but the whopper wasn’t in sight. At first I thought he was hiding in the shadow or had wedged in among the stones, but after I poked around with a stick and couldn’t make him budge I began to get frightened. Frightened is the right word, and you would know it was if you had a five-pound small-mouthed black bass and it looked as if he had escaped.
I got down flat and looked as hard as I could, but Mr. Bass was gone. There wasn’t a doubt of it.