“O-o-o!” squealed Dot. “What animal?”
“I don’t know. Not a mole. Moles don’t make such a big hump in the ground.”
As the girls wondered, Uncle Rufus came up from the henhouse. He saw the strange looking mound, too.
“Glo-ree!” he gasped. “How come dat?”
“We don’t know, Uncle Rufus,” said Tess eagerly. “We just found it.”
“Somebody been buryin’ a dawg in we-uns back yard? My soul!”
“Oh, it can’t be!” cried Tess.
“And it isn’t Sandy-face,” Dot declared. “For she’s in the kitchen with all her children.”
“Wait er bit—wait er bit,” said the old man, solemnly. “Unc’ Rufus gwine ter look inter dis yere matter. It sho’ is a misery”—meaning “mystery.”
He brought a shovel and dug down beside the mound. Lifting out a huge shovelful of dirt, there were scattered all about the path a great number of swollen and messy brown things that, for a moment, the girls did not identify. Then Uncle Rufus lifted up his voice in a roar: