“I didn’t swear,” I said to Dragonfly. “I was just talking to God.”
“You what?”
“I was just telling Him it was an awful pretty storm.”
“You mean—you mean you aren’t afraid to talk to Him?”
Imagine that little guy saying that! But then, he hadn’t been a Christian very long and didn’t seem to understand that praying and talking to God are the same thing, and everybody ought to do it, and if your sins have been washed away, then there isn’t anything to be afraid of.
I was aroused from what I’d been thinking, by my acrobatic goat calling to us from back in the cabin saying, “Hey, Gang! Aren’t we going to explore this old shell and see if we can find the ransom money?”
That sort of brought me back from where for a few minutes my mind had been.
I took another quick look at the little moving mountains on the lake and pretty soon we were all inside where Circus had been all the time looking around to see what he could find. But it was too dark to see anything very clearly, and we didn’t have any flashlight. I looked on a high mantel above the fireplace to see if there was any kerosene lamp, but there wasn’t. There wasn’t any furniture in the main room except a table, three small chairs and one great big old-fashioned Morris chair like one my pop always sat in at home in our living room. It had a fierce-looking tiger head with a wide-open mouth on the end of each arm, which gave me an eery feeling when I saw them, which I did right away, when Circus lit one of the matches he had with him.
“Here’s a candle, out here on the kitchen table,” Dragonfly said, and brought it in to where we were. It certainly was the darkest cabin on the inside I ever saw. The walls were almost black, and the stone arch at the top of the fireplace was black with smoke where the fireplace had probably smoked when it had a fire in it. There was only about an inch of the candle left.
Circus lit it while Poetry held it, and we followed Poetry all around wherever he went. The noise of the storm and the dark cabin made it seem like we were having a strange adventure in the middle of the night.