# Roy Blakeley's Adventures in Camp/Chapter XXVII

CHAPTER XXVII
TELLS ABOUT HOW, WE TRIED TO STOP IT RAINING
JUMPING jiminy! That was a new one on me. Lakes moving around like people that live in flats—good night! And where would Temple Camp be, I'd like to know? And just after we paid four dollars and eighteen cents to put up a spring-board.
"If you wouldn't mind," I said, "I'd like to know how that could happen. Because if it's going away I'm going to stalk it."
"Do you know what erosion is?" he said.
"Not guilty," I told him.
"Well," he said, "it's earth being eaten away, kind of."
"By who?" I asked, "he must have some appetite."
"By the water," he said; "that's what causes changes in topography."
"All right," I said, "I'll take your word for it. But will the lake be there when we get back, because I've got some eel lines out?"
​He said, "Oh, yes, it won't move till May first."
"Thank goodness for that," I told him.
I guess maybe you'd better look at the map now, hey? It isn't much of a map, but you should worry. If you don't take a good look at it, pretty soon you won't know where you're at. I guess you can squint out the valley between the mountains. That's Nick's Valley, everything around there belonged to old Nick. If he didn't own the moon, it was because he couldn't reach it.
Now, that's just where we went through, see? And it was all full of puddles—young lakes. I couldn't draw them with a pencil, but they were there. I can prove it, because I got my feet wet. Pretty soon Bert said, "Here's where you ought to have your scout staff with you," and just then I stumbled down among a lot of brush.
"Now you're in it," he said,
"In what?" I asked him.
"Tn the bed," he said.
"You call this a bed?" I asked him, "I like a brass bed better."
"If you'd only had your staff, you could have felt ahead."
​"I can feel a head now," I told him, "and it's got a good bump on it."
"Well," he said, "you're right in the hollow where the old creek used to flow. Let's push along through it a little ways and see what we can dig up."
You couldn't see that it was a hollow just looking at it, but you had to go down into it and then you knew. It was all grown up with bushes and we just went along through it, the same as if we were pushing through a jungle. All of a sudden I felt something crunch under my foot, and when I picked it up, I saw it was a fish's backbone.
"See," Bert said, "what did I tell you?"
It seemed funny to be squirming our way along where a creek used to flow before it changed its mind and decided to flow into Bowl Valley. "Maybe it changed its mind and made the lake because it knew the scouts were coming, hey?" I asked. "That was a good turn."
"It was a good long turn," he said. "And nobody around here seems to know anything about this old creek bottom. We just stumbled into it the same as you did. That's some bump you've got."
"Sure, my topography is changed," I told him.
​He said, "Old Nick fought in the Revolutionary War. He owned all this land around here right through to the lake—I mean Bowl Valley. His house was at the bottom of Bowl Valley."
"What do you say we fish it up some day?" I asked him.
"All this was his farm," Bert said. "See that old silo there? I guess that's what it was, or something like it."
"Maybe 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 x 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 thé old creek bed, till pretty soon the bushes were so thick that we hit up north of it 2 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.