I related my experience to Sipes the next time I saw him. He was deeply interested.
“Did ye hear any groanin’ after them funny sounds?” he asked, with a quizzical look in his eye. I replied that I had not.
“I’ll tell ye wot we’ll do,” said he, after a few moments of reflection, “you an’ me’ll go down to that bogie house some time an’ we’ll butt in an’ see wot’s doin’. I gotta go that way in the boat next week. We’ll take the gun, an’ mebbe we’ll blow that bogie offen the top o’ the house. I seen that place last year an’ I know where it is.”
I did not approve of the idea of needlessly invading the privacy of anybody who did not want to see us, and who had inhospitably stocked their domain with brush-piles, ghosts, and forbidding placards, but there was a strange look in Sipes’s eye that convinced me that the trip might in some way be justified.
On the appointed day we made the start. “I always spend jest an hour tunin’ up the Bug,” remarked the old man, as he began cranking the motor, “an’ then if she don’t pop, I cuss ’er out fer jest fifteen minutes, an’ then I row. Hell, I gotta have some system!”
Fortunately the Bug was in good humor and took us three-quarters of the distance without a break. It then went to sleep, and half an hour’s cranking and assiduous doctoring failed to arouse it.
“I got a great scheme,” said Sipes. “W’en she gits like that I fasten the steerin’ gear solid fer the way I want to go, an’ then w’en I keep on crankin’, the propeller goes ’round an’ ’round, an’ I keep goin’ some.”
A little later a single turn of the fly-wheel started the treacherous device, but it was going backward. Sipes promptly seized the oars and turned the stern of the boat toward our destination.
“We got ’er now! Jest keep quiet an’ touch wood! Sometimes she likes to do that, an’ if I try to reverse ’er she’ll balk. She thinks it’s time to go home, but it ain’t. This crawfish navigat’n’s fine w’en ye git used to it.”
We landed beyond a point on the beach which was opposite to the cabin. After we had secured the boat to some heavy drift-wood with a long rope, I followed Sipes up the side of a bluff west of the cabin. We made a detour through the woods and approached it at dusk. The dry brush-piles practically surrounded it at a distance of about fifty yards.