I knew it would have been easy if we had followed the trail before in the daytime and had known what kind of broken twigs to look for and how far apart they were.
Poetry didn’t like to give up, so when he got back to where I was, he wanted to start out again, but I said, “What if we would get lost out there somewhere?”
“We’d just follow the trail back again,” he said, but his voice sounded like he had already given up. We decided to go back to camp and get some sleep, and tomorrow we would come back in broad daylight and be able to see where we were going.
9
WE hurried back to camp as quickly as we could, sneaked up to our own tent where my acrobatic goat and my Man Friday were sleeping, and started undressing and getting into our pajamas. I felt pretty saddish on account of the map being gone, but there wasn’t anything we could do till morning.
We kept our flashlights turned off so as not to wake up the other two guys. We could see a little on account of the moonlight that was pouring down on the top of our tent.
“Where you guys been?” my Man Friday said to me from behind me.
His voice scared me ’cause I’d thought he was asleep. “We’ve been out looking for the invisible-ink map,” my fat goat answered for me—“either somebody stole it out of Robinson Crusoe’s shirt pocket, or we lost it back on the trail somewhere this afternoon.”
“Oh, is that where you’ve been?” my Man Friday said. “Why didn’t you tell me? I’ve got it here under my pillow. I was afraid somebody would steal it, so I took it out of Crusoe’s pocket and hid it here.”