“Go ahead—who’s stopping you?” I said. In a jiffy I was scrambling into my clothes, while Poetry was doing the same thing, each one of us knowing what the other one of us wanted to do.
In less than a little while we had on our clothes so we wouldn’t get cold while we stepped outside into the kinda chilly night, like nights are up North even in the summertime. We had our two flashlights and were soon looking around the outside of our tent, sneaking along as quietly as we could so as not to wake up any of the rest of the gang in the other tent.
We flashed our flashlights on and off all around the circle where we had been sitting at the campfire service, but there wasn’t a sign of any envelope there. Then we looked all around the lean-to where we had gotten the dry logs for Eagle Eye’s Indian fire, but still didn’t find anything, so Poetry and I followed the path up the shore to the fish cemetery and looked all around where we had been digging to bury the fish heads and entrails.
“Maybe it fell out of your pocket when you were digging here,” Poetry said, but there wasn’t a sign of what we were looking for there anywhere either. It was just like looking for a needle in a haystack when there isn’t any needle to look for.
“Will you ever!” Poetry exclaimed, tossing his light all around in a circle at the newly-made fish graves. “The coons’ve already been here,” which I could see they had. I flashed my flashlight from place to place and off into the woods in a big circle and up into the trees but didn’t see a thing that looked like bright shining eyes or pretty gray fur or a furry tail with black furry rings around it, which is the kind of tails ring-tailed coons have.
From the fish cemetery we went out to the end of the dock and back, then to our tent again. When we stopped in front of the closed flap we listened, but my Man Friday and my acrobatic goat were as quiet as mice, so we decided they were asleep.
“Do you know what?” Poetry said, and I said, “What?” and he said, “I think we’d better go back up along the trail where we were this afternoon to see if maybe we dropped it along there somewhere.”
I couldn’t imagine us being able to find it at night, like that, even if it was there. Besides, I still had the notion—in fact, a very creepy feeling inside of me—that somebody must’ve sneaked into our tent while we were asleep and stolen it out of my pocket.
“Well,” Poetry said, “when did you last look at it? When did you last have it out of your pocket? Where were you when you last saw it?” and I must confess that the last time I had seen the envelope was when we were still in the cabin. I had shoved it into my shirt pocket right beside where I kept my New Testament.
When I told Poetry that, he said, “O.K., then, when did you last have your New Testament out of your pocket?”