“Exactly!” quoth the Shark, but kept his gaze upon the map. “And so there is a government marker down by the river—on a little rise? Wonder if it isn’t about there?”
Mr. Grant looked at the spot to which the Shark pointed. “You’ve hit it close, young man,” he declared.
A very slight, but very satisfied, smile lessened the severity of the Shark’s expression. “I felt pretty sure I had,” he remarked complacently.
Mrs. Grant turned from poking the fire and mounding the birch logs to her fancy.
“No; we don’t have floods often in Sugar Valley,” she observed, “though anybody might think we would. Somehow, the river takes care of the water. Of course, ’way back in Dominie Pike’s time, they did have some amazing freshets—he told about ’em in his diary, you know.”
Tom Orkney bent forward. “Then you’ve seen the diary, ma’am?” he inquired eagerly.
Mrs. Grant laughed. “Bless your heart, no! It disappeared years before I happened along.”
“Oh!” There was a disappointment in Tom’s tone, which didn’t escape Mrs. Grant’s attention.
“It is an awful pity!” she said. “The Dominie, I guess, put down ’most everything that happened, and if folks could find his book now, they could settle a lot of points they’re disputing. But seventy-five or eighty years ago people didn’t set such store by old things—they were too glad to get new ones, maybe—and so lots of stuff was lost that would bring high prices nowadays. Why, the diary just knocked about, as you might say—or part of it did. Mr. Grant’s grandfather always insisted that the Dominie filled three or four note-books, and that the one folks saw—that’s the one, by the way, all the stories told now are based on—why, he always argued that that was the last, or next to the last, of the set. ’Tis a fact it didn’t tell much about the very earliest days of the settlement—I’ve heard that point spoken of. But, anyway, it passed from hand to hand in the family, and was borrowed by neighbors, and got all thumbed and dog-eared, and worn and tattered; and, finally, it just dropped out of sight. Too bad, but that’s what happened.”
“Nobody copied it?” asked Tom.