be 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."

"What for?" Bert said; "there's nothing but puddles at the bottom. How
would you ever get out?"

"Couldn't we drop one of those saplings into it and I could shin up
that?" I said. Because I saw two or three saplings lying around. I
suppose they blew down in the storms lately.

"What would be the use?" he asked; "you can see what's down there. If
we're going to get those letters onto a mail train, we've got to
hustle."

That was enough for me, because I cared more about Skinny than I did
about all the old creek bottoms and holes in the ground this side of
Jericho. So I just said, "Righto," and we started following the old
creek bed, till pretty soon the bushes were so thick that we hit up
north of it a little ways and hiked straight over to the houseboat.

When we got to the house-boat we lowered the skiff and rowed across to
Catskill and mailed the letters. Then we went up the street for a
couple of sodas. Bert bought some peanut brittle, too--I'm crazy about
that. Then we went to another store and got some post cards. Some of
them had pictures of Temple Camp on them. I sent home about six. All
the while it was getting dark and pretty soon it began to rain, so I
said, "Let's go and get a couple more sodas till it holds up." We drank
two sodas each, but even still it didn't hold up.

"We can't make it hold up that way," Bert said; "I don't believe twenty
sodas would do it, the way it's raining now."

"I guess you're right," I said, "but, anyway, I'm willing to try
twenty, if you say so."

No fellow could ever say _I_ was a quitter.

CHAPTER XXVIII

TELLS ABOUT HOW DAME NATURE CHANGED HER MIND

Maybe you'll laugh at that stopping a shower with sodas. But once on my
way home from school I stopped i