"Or in a cave," added Ted. "They look as if they lived in a cave."
"There isn't any cave on the island, as far as I know," his grandfather told Ted. "But I don't like those strange men roaming about our place here. They may not do any harm, but I don't like it. I'll have another look for them."
"So will I," added Teddy, but he did not say this aloud. Teddy had made up his mind to do something. He was going to look for those men himself, either in a cave or a gypsy wagon. Ted wanted to find the ragged man—find all of them if more than one; and there seemed to be at least two, for the one who had pulled Teddy out of the spring had spoken of another—a "professor."
"What's a professor?" asked Jan.
"Oh, it's a man or a woman who has studied his lessons and teaches them to others," answered her mother. "One who knows a great deal about something, such as about the stars or about the world we live in. Professors find out many things and then tell others—young people generally—about them."
"I'm going to be a professor," said Teddy.
"Are you?" inquired his mother with a smile. "I hope you will get wise enough to be one."
But Teddy did not speak all that was in his mind. If a professor was one who found out things, then the small boy decided he would be one long enough to find out about the tramps, and perhaps find the cave where they lived, and then he could tell Jan.
When Trouble had been put into dry clothes and sent to sleep by his mother's singing, "Ding-dong bell, Pussy's in the well," Jan and Ted sat by themselves, talking over what had happened that day. Ted was making a small boat to sail on the lake, and Jan was mending her doll's dress, where a prickly briar bush had torn a little hole in it.
Early the next morning Ted slipped away from his place at the breakfast table, and motioned to Jan to join him behind the sleeping tent. Ted held his finger over his lips to show his sister that he wanted her to keep very quiet.