For fifty-seven minutes by his watch, Tom waited. Then the tip end of Llewellyn’s nose emerged slowly, cautiously, and remained stationary.
Eleven minutes of tense silence elapsed.
Then the tip end of Llewellyn’s nose emerged a trifle more, stopped, started again and lo, his whole head and neck were out, craned stiffly upward toward the camp.
Tom did not move a muscle, he hardly breathed. Soon the turtle’s tail was sticking straight out and one forward claw was emerging slowly, doubtfully.
Silence.
Another claw emerged and the neck relaxed its posture of listening reconnaissance. Then, presto, Llewellyn was waddling around like a lumbering old ferry boat and heading straight for the lake. As he waddled along in a bee line something which Tom had once read came flashing into his mind, which was that no matter where a turtle is placed, be it in the middle of the Desert of Sahara, he will travel a bee line for the nearest water.
But his recollection of this was as nothing to Tom now, when he saw with mingled feelings of shame and excitement something which seemed to open a way to the most dramatic possibilities.
As the turtle entered the muddy area near the lake Tom realized, what he should have known before, that the tracks which Hervey Willetts had followed from the mountain and which Skinny had followed from the lake were the tracks of a turtle! The tracks of a turtle coming from a locality where it did not belong, straight for the still water which was its natural element.
With a quick inspiration Tom darted forward into the mud catching the turtle just as it was waddling into the water. He did not know why he did this, it was just upon an impulse, and in making the sudden reach he all but lost his balance. As it was he had to swing both arms to keep his feet, and as he did so the turtle fell upside down in the drier mud a few feet back from shore. As Tom lifted it, there, imprinted in the mud were the letters H. T.
The initials T. H. on the creature’s back had been reversed when he fell upside down. And Tom realized with a thrill that what had just happened before his eyes had happened at that log up in the woods.