Then he said, "Well, from all I can learn, old Nick owned all the land for miles around here, and he lived at the bottom of Black Lake." "Good night," I said, "if I owned as much land as that, I wouldn't live at the bottom of a lake." "Kind of damp, huh?" he asked; "but you see Black Lake wasn't here then." "Where was it?" I asked him. "Well it just wasn't," he said; "it was dry land. The way I make it out, it was Bowl Valley, and old Nick lived right down in the bottom of Bowl Valley. There's an old woman on the Berry Creek road who smokes a clay pipe. She's about a hundred years old. She told me all about it. People around here can't even tell you where Bowl Valley was. They don't know what you're talking about when you mention such a place. I dug up a whole lot of stuff about it. Old Nick's got descendants living around here now, and they don't even know about it." "But you found out," I said. "That's because I'm an old tramp," he said, laughing sort of; "I like to sit up on barnyard fences and chin with old wives--whenever I can manage to get away from my patrol." "Gee, I don't blame them for not letting you get away from them," I said. All the while we were hiking it along between the mountains and it was pretty wet in some places, because it was a low valley we were in. "Now this is Nick's Valley," Bert said; "it's all full of puddles, hey? Look out for your feet. This will bring us out at the old creek bed and we can follow that down to the Hudson. Look at that fish, will you? A killie, huh? Washed away in here. Some rains!" He poked a little killie out from under some grass with his stick--honest, that fellow never missed anything. "Sometimes I root out the funniest kinds of insects you ever saw with a stick," he said; "it's a kind of a magic wand. Ever talk with a civil engineer?" "Believe me," I said, "the only civil engineer I ever talked with, did most of the talking. He wouldn't let us play ball in his lot. He was an uncivil engineer, that's what _he_ was." Bert said, "Well, there was a civil engineer here with a troop from out west somewhere. He was a scoutmaster. He took me on a couple of good hikes. We found some turtle shells over through there, a little farther along, and when he took a squint at the land he saw how a little valley, all grown up with weeds and brush, ran along east and west. He said that was where the creek once flowed and it didn't come within a mile of the lake. Savvy? The place where the lake is now used to be Bowl Valley. When the creek changed its bed and cut through a couple of miles south, it just filled up Bowl Valley and there you are--Black Lake. Presto chango! Funny how old Dame Nature changes her mind now and then." "That's just the way it is with girls," I said. Bert said, "Well, and that scoutmaster said she'd be changing her mind again some day, too. He said the topography around here is pretty shaky--whatever that means."