“Tofacco! Gold — tofacco! I wonder whether that will mean anything to him?” Ken turned a little away from the microphone. “This may not be one of the creatures you’ve been trading with — after all, we’re not in the usual place.”
“That’s not the principal question!” Feth’s tentacles coiled tightly around his torso, as though he were expecting a thunderbolt to strike somewhere in the neighborhood. The voice which had made the last statement was that of Laj Drai.
7
Roger Wing, at thirteen years of age, was far from stupid. He had very little doubt where his father and brother had been, and he found the fact of considerable interest. A few minutes’ talk with Edie gave him a fairly accurate idea of how long they had been gone; and within ten minutes of the time he and his mother returned from Clark Fork he had sharply modified his older ideas about the location of the “secret mine.” Hitherto, his father had always been away several days on his visits to it.
“You know, Edie, that mine can’t be more than eight or ten miles from here, at the outside.” The two were feeding the horses, and Roger had made sure the younger children were occupied elsewhere. “I talked to Don for about two minutes, and I know darned well Dad was showing him the mine. I’m going to see it, too, before the summer’s out. I’ll take bets on it.”
“Do you think you ought to? After all, if Dad wanted us to know, he’d tell us.”
“I don’t care. I have a right to know anything I can find out. Besides, we can do a better job of scouting if we know the place we’re supposed to be protecting.”
“Well — maybe.”
“Besides, you know Dad sometimes sets things up just so we’ll find things out for ourselves. After it’s all over he just says that’s what we have brains for. Remember he never actually said we weren’t to go looking for the mine — he just said he’d tell us when the time came. How about that?”
“Well — maybe. What are you going to do about it? If you try to follow Dad you’ll be picked up like a dime in a schoolroom.”