I said, “Let’s sit down and think it over and figure it out by geometry; let’s not get excited. Three things were in a bee-line, the cooking shack and the house and we ourselves. Deny it if you can. The smoke died and we hiked straight for the house. Didn’t we? Now here we are almost at the house and the smoke is there again, and it’s the same chimney and it’s way out north of us and we’ve been hiking southwest. What’s the answer?” “It’s all because Hervey Willetts is leading us,” Pee-wee shouted. “If that fellow started to go across the street he’d end at—at—at South Africa—he would.”
“Are we going to get lost again?” little Willie Cook piped up.
“Again?” I said. “Excuse me while I laugh. We’ve got the babes in the woods beaten twenty-eleven ways. I wish we had a compass.”
“I wouldn’t believe one if you had it,” Pee-wee shouted.
“Let’s hustle and follow the smoke while it’s still going up,” Warde said.
“It’s dying down!” Pee-wee shouted.
“Let it die,” I said. “I’m going to find out what happened. If the earth is off its axis we ought to know it.”
“We’ll have to hike to the North Pole,” Hervey said.
“Oh sure, start off,” I told him; “we’ll follow you.”
“I want to know how a bee-line got bent,” Bert said.
“I never knew Temple Camp to do such a thing before as long as I’ve known it,” I said. “I’m surprised at Temple Camp. I don’t understand it. It’s trying to escape us.”
“We’ll foil it yet,” Hervey said. “When it comes to hide-and-seek that’s my middle name. I intend to go to Temple Camp now just for spite. We’ll each go in a different direction and surround it and close in on it. What do you say?”
“Suppose we start east again?” I said. “Maybe that’ll take us there because Temple Camp is north. We’ll make a flank move.”
Pee-wee said, very dark and determined like, “I’m going to follow that chimney. The rest of you can go where you want to.”
“First let’s go to the house and get a drink of water,” Warde said.
So then we went on till we came to the road, and g-o-o-d night, there we stood on the edge of the embankment, staring.
“Well—what—do—you—know—about—that?” one of the fellows just blurted out.
“I knew it all the time,” I said; “that house is not to be trusted. I’ll never trust another house as long as I live, I don’t care if it’s a Sunday School even. I wouldn’t trust a public school.”
The rest of them were laughing so hard they just couldn’t speak. There in the road just below us was a great big wagon with a kind of a trestle on it. And on ............