Then he said, "Well, from all I can learn, old Nick owned all the land for miles around here, and he lived at the bottom of Black Lake."
"Good night," I said, "if I owned as much land as that, I wouldn't live at the bottom of a lake."
"Kind of damp, huh?" he asked; "but you see Black Lake wasn't here then."
"Where was it?" I asked him.
"Well it just wasn't," he said; "it was dry land. The way I make it out, it was Bowl Valley, and old Nick lived right down in the bottom of Bowl Valley. There's an old woman on the Berry Creek road who smokes a clay pipe. She's about a hundred years old. She told me all about it. People around here can't even tell you where Bowl Valley was. They don't know what you're talking about when you mention such a place. I dug up a whole lot of stuff about it. Old Nick's got descendants living around here now, and they don't even know about it."
"But you found out," I said.
"That's because I'm an old tramp," he said, laughing sort of; "I like to sit up on barnyard fences and chin with old wives—whenever I can manage to get away from my patrol."
"Gee, I don't blame them for not letting you get away from them," I said.
All the while we were hiking it along between the mountains and it was pretty wet in some places, because it was a low valley we were in.
"Now this is Nick's Valley," Bert said; "it's all full of puddles, hey? Look out for your feet. This will bring us out at the old creek bed and we can follow that down to the Hudson. Look at that fish, will you? A killie, huh? Washed away in here. Some rains!" He poked a little killie out from under some grass with his stick—honest, that fellow never missed anything. "Sometimes I root out the funniest kinds of insects you ever saw with a stick," he said; "it's a kind of a magic wand. Ever talk with a civil engineer?"