"This is my third season here," I said, "and I never even heard about any old creek bed. I never heard about Nick's Valley either."
"Guess you never talked much with the old farmers, hey?" he asked.
We rowed across the lake to Nick's Cove (I knew all about that, because it was where the campers were and besides I knew about it anyway). If you will look on the map you'll see it and you'll notice how there are mountains there—kind of two sets of mountains with a space between. I made that map so you could see just how everything happened, because, believe me, we were going to have some adventure. Only we didn't know it.
We rowed way up into the end of Nick's Cove and pulled the skiff part way up on shore. One thing I noticed and that was that some of the trees around there stood in the water. I knew that was on account of the lake being swollen, because there had been so much rain lately. Even over at Temple Camp the water was up to the spring-board, so that when we jumped on it, it splashed right into the lake.
"Cove is pretty big after all the rain," Bert said. And then, sure enough, he looked around and broke a branch off a tree and pulled the twigs off it. "That'll do to poke around with," he said, "now come ahead."
"You and your stick are like Uncle Jeb and his pipe," I told him.
He said, "Now we'll wend our way through old Nick's Valley. It'll bring us right out near the old creek bed. Then we can follow that right down to the river. That's the way Skinny did, but I guess he just stumbled through that way. Ever hear of old Nick?"
"Only on account of the name, Nick's Cove," I said; "is he dead?"
"Oh, very much dead," he said; "he died about a hundred years ago.
Didn't you know he was dead?"
"Believe me, I never even knew he was sick," I told him.