Well, believe me, we hit a plan all right; we more than hit it, we gave it a knockout blow.
All the while we were talking, he was taking us across the lawn till pretty soon we came to a little patch of woods and as soon as I got a whiff of those trees, good night, I felt as if I was up at Temple Camp already. That’s a funny thing about trees—you get to know them and like them sort of.
Then pretty soon we came to a creek that ran through the woods and I could see it was deep and all shaded by the trees. Oh, jiminy, it was fine. And you could hear it ripple too, just like the water of Black Lake up near Temple Camp. If I was a grown-up author I could write some dandy stuff about it, because it was all dark and spooky as you might say, and you could see the trees reflected in it and casting their something or other—you know what I mean.
“Can you follow a trail?” Mr. Donnelle asked us.
“Trails are our middle names,” I told him, “and I can follow one——”
“Whither so which?” I said. Because he was trying to talk high brow just because he knew Mr. Donnelle was an author.
So he led us along a trail that ran along the shore all in and out through trees, and he said it was all his property. Pretty soon I could see part of a house through the trees and I thought I’d like to live there, it was so lonely.
“You mean secluded,” Pee-wee said. Mr. Donnelle smiled and I told him Pee-wee was a young dictionary—pocket size.
Pretty soon we reached the house and, _good night_, it wasn’t any house at all; it was a house-boat. And I could see the fixtures for a wireless on it, only the wires had been taken down.
Then Mr. Donnelle said, “Boys,” he said, “this is my old workshop and I have spent many happy hours in it. But I don’t use it any more and if you boys think you could all pile into it, why you are welcome to it for the summer. It has no power, but perhaps you could tow it behind your launch. Anyway you may charter it for the large sum of nothing at all, as a reward for foiling a spy.”
“I—I kind of knew you were not a spy all the time,” said Pee-wee.
Well, I was so flabbergasted that I just couldn’t speak and even Pee-wee was struck dumb. We just gaped like a couple of idiots, and after a while I said, “Cracky, it’s too good to be true.”