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 a 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 the old creek bed, till pretty soon the bushes were so thick that we hit up north of it a 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."