It seemed funny to be squirming our way along where a creek used to flow before it changed its mind and decided to flow into Bowl Valley. "Maybe it changed its mind and made the lake because it knew the scouts were coming, hey?" I asked. "That was a good turn."
"It was a good long turn," he said. "And nobody around here seems to know anything about this old creek bottom. We just stumbled into it the same as you did. That's some bump you've got."
"Sure, my topography is changed," I told him.
He said, "Old Nick fought in the Revolutionary War. He owned all this land around here right through to the lake—I mean Bowl Valley. His house was at the bottom of Bowl Valley."
"What do you say we fish it up some day?" I asked him.
"All this was his farm," Bert said. "See that old silo there? I guess that's what it was, or something like it."
"Maybe he hid muskets or powder from the redcoats there, hey?" I said.
Now if you'll look at the map, you'll see just where we were. I was right on the edge of that ring I made. Do you see the ring? Well, that ring was really a round hole in the ground just beside the old creek bottom. Gee, I wish you could have seen that hole. Because you can't make a hole on a map.
It was about fifty feet deep and about thirty feet wide, I guess, and it was all walled in with masonry. It looked like a great well. Bert thought it had something to do with the farm that used to be there, because quite near it, there was an old foundation. Maybe it was some kind of a silo, I don't know.
I said, "I'd like to get down in that."