"Oh, boy," I said, "break it to me gently. Do you mean that some fine day we'll wake up and find Black Lake has sneaked off?" "That's just about it," he said. "Do you call that fair and square?" I asked; "after Mr. Temple bought the lake and gave it to Temple Camp. Believe me, it _ought_ to be called Black Lake; it isn't very white, that's one sure thing." "That may not happen for a thousand years," Bert said. 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 springboard. "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. "In 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?"