Nobody answered the knock so he knocked again and called, “Hello! Anybody home?”
He waited and so did we, but there wasn’t any answer, so he turned the knob, twisting it this way and that, and the door didn’t open. He turned around to us and said, “It’s locked.”
Well, I had it in the back of my mind that the ransom money might be in that cabin and that we ought to go in and look, as I told you, not thinking that it was trespassing on somebody’s property to go in without permission.
We found a window on one side of the cabin right next to the hill, which on that side of the house was kinda like a cliff, and that window, when we tried it, was unlocked.
“You go in through the window and unlock the door from the inside and let us in,” I said to my acrobatic goat, and he said, “It’s private property.”
Right that second I felt a drop of rain on my face and that’s what saved the day and made it all right for us to go inside. We all must have been so interested in following the trail of broken twigs and in our game of Robinson Crusoe that we hadn’t noticed the lowering sky and the big thunderheads that had been creeping up, for only about a few jiffies after that first drop of rain splashed onto my freckled face, there was a rumble of thunder, then another, and right away it started to rain.
We could have ducked under some trees for protection, but it was that kind of rain that sometimes comes when it seems like the sky has burst open and water just drives down in blinding sheets, which it started to do.
“It’s raining pitchforks and nigger babies!” Circus yelled above the roar of the wind in the trees. He quick shoved up the window and scrambled in, with all of us scrambling in after him and slamming the window down behind us.
The rain was coming down so hard that it made a terrible roaring noise on the shingled roof, reminding me of storms just like that back at Sugar Creek when I was in the haymow of our barn. If there was anything I liked to hear better than almost anything else, it was rain on a shingled roof. Sometimes when I was in the upstairs of our house, I would open the attic door on purpose just to hear the friendly noise the rain made.
It was pretty dark inside the old cabin on account of the walls were stained with a dark stain of some kind, maybe to protect the wood, like some north woods cabins are. It was also dark on account of the sky outside was almost black with terribly heavy rain clouds. I noticed that the window we’d climbed in was the kitchen window and that there was a table with an oil cloth, with a few soiled dishes on one side next to the wall. Also there was a white enameled sink and an old-fashioned pitcher pump like the one we have outdoors at our house at Sugar Creek.