We shined our lights in quick circles all over the floor, thinking maybe John Till might not have known there was an envelope which we might have dropped here. Then we went out onto the front porch and looked very carefully in the direction his boat had gone to be sure he was really around the bend and couldn’t see our lights.
“Look!” Poetry said. “Here’s the whiskey bottle, standing just where it was, and it’s still just as half full as it was!”
I looked and could hardly believe my eyes, but it was true. “It must have had water in it instead of whiskey,” Poetry said, “or John Till would have drunk it up the very minute he laid his eyes on it.”
I put my nose close to the top of the bottle and smelled, and sure enough it smelled just like whiskey, which is an even worse smell than something that has been dead for a week.
I looked down at the place where I had been standing in the afternoon when I had pulled the New Testament out of my pocket to see if the envelope with the map in it was there, and it wasn’t.
Then we turned and walked back toward the door which led into the main room.
When I got to the place where the mirror was on the wall, I looked in it just to have a look at myself. I looked past my face and away out onto the very pretty lake which was shimmering like silver in the moonlight. Even though I didn’t have time to think about how pretty it was, I remembered the happy feeling I had had in my heart in the afternoon; and while Poetry and I were going through the main room, past the fireplace and into the kitchen and were climbing out of the window to go back to camp, I thought that God could make just as pretty a moonlight night as He could a thunderstorm. In spite of the fact that I was all tangled up in a very interesting and exciting adventure, I couldn’t help but be glad that I was on God’s side and that He could count on me to be a friend of His anytime He needed me.
We didn’t have any trouble following our broken twig trail to the place where it turned off in another direction. There we stopped and Poetry said, “I wish we could follow this trail of broken twigs tonight, and not wait till tomorrow. It might be too late tomorrow. Do you know that it goes in the same direction John Till’s boat was going?”
“What of it?” I said. My teeth were still chattering and I was pretty cold and wet and also tired, and wished I was back in camp, snuggled down in my nice warm cozy sleeping bag.
“We’d get lost in less than three minutes,” I said to Poetry, “and then what would we do?”