"He's with Uncle Jeb most likely," Bert said. "Wonder what the old man thinks about it? Ever look into those gray eyes of his?" "You never catch Uncle Jeb saying anything till he's sure," I said, "and even then, it takes him a couple of minutes to get his pipe out of his mouth. He says when you aim always aim as if you had only one bullet and it was the last one in the world." "That's him all right," Bert said. "Well, there's no good worrying," I told him; "we'll just get back as soon as we can." "What do you say we row across and cut through Nick's Valley?" Bert asked, "It's shorter." "I'm game," I said, "the quicker the sooner." "We can follow the old creek bed," he said. "Know where that is, don't you?" I said, "Believe me, the only bed I know anything about is the one I sleep in. I don't see how you find out so many things, especially as you were never here before." "Oh, I like to just prowl around," he said, "that's the way with tigers." "I notice you always have a stick, too," I said. He said, "Sure a stick's good company. I just root around with it." "This is my third season here," I said, "and I never even heard about any old creek bed. I never heard about Nick's Valley either." "Guess you never talked much with the old farmers, hey?" he asked. We rowed across the lake to Nick's Cove (I knew all about that, because it was where the campers were and besides I knew about it anyway). If you will look on the map you'll see it and you'll notice how there are mountains there--kind of two sets of mountains with a space between. I made that map so you could see just how everything happened, because, believe me, we were going to have _some_ adventure. Only we didn't know it. We rowed way up into the end of Nick's Cove and pulled the skiff part way up on shore. One thing I noticed and that was that some of the trees around there stood in the water. I knew that was on account of the lake being swollen, because there had been so much rain lately. Even over at Temple Camp the water was up to the spring-board, so that when we jumped on it, it splashed right into the lake. "Cove is pretty big after all the rain," Bert said. And then, sure enough, he looked around and broke a branch off a tree and pulled the twigs off it. "That'll do to poke around with," he said, "now come ahead." "You and your stick are like Uncle Jeb and his pipe," I told him. He said, "Now we'll wend our way through old Nick's Valley. It'll bring us right out near the old creek bed. Then we can follow that right down to the river. That's the way Skinny did, but I guess he just stumbled through that way. Ever hear of old Nick?" "Only on account of the name, Nick's Cove," I said; "is he dead?" "Oh, very much dead," he said; "he died about a hundred years ago. Didn't you know he was dead?" "Believe _me_, I never even knew he was sick," I told him.