We didn't dare to start out without Pee-wee, so we shook him up and dragged him up and down the aisle and played football with him, and at last he let out a long groan and we knew we had him started. "Wh-a-a-t--where--am I?" he yawned. "We were just going to have a game of one o'cat with you," I told him; "wake up, it's twenty years later; the peace treaty has just been signed." "Who signed it?" he gasped. "I did," I said; "come on, get up." If you can once get him on his feet, he usually stays up. I said, "We're in a land of mystery; we've got Alice in Wonderland tearing her hair from jealousy. I think we're in somebody's back yard." "Where's the train?" he asked. "It went down the street to get a soda," I said. That opened his eyes all right. "Can you get sodas around here?" he shouted. We got hold of a chunk of wood and blocked one of the car wheels and then started out. We couldn't see very well in the dark, but we made out that the high fence went all the way around a great big flat field. There was a kind of a wide road around near the fence. The tracks ran right up under that building that we had seen ahead of us, into a kind of a tunnel. We saw it was an ice-house, and I guess ice was loaded onto cars there. The two white things that we had seen were tents and there was a light in one of them, but we didn't go in. There were little buildings around, but they were closed up. There was a kind of a big platform with a railing around it. In another place there was a long shed full of cows. There were kind of things like mess boards all around, only some of them were too high for mess boards. "I give it up," I said "It's a cross between a barn-yard and a picnic ground," Connie said. Westy said, "I think it's an aviation field." "Sure," I told him; "how stupid of me. And the cows are aviators." "What do you say we follow the fence around?" Westy said. "What do you say we don't?" I said. "Come on, let's go back and I'll cook some fritters and then we'll get our suits off and have a good sleep, and to-morrow we'll see what we see." We were all pretty sleepy, so we decided to do that. If we had taken a little hike all the way around near the fence, the terrible thing that I am going to tell you about now, would never have happened. You had better get ready for it, because it's one of the most terrible things that I ever told. When you hear about it, you'll turn cold and your hair will stand up. Even now whenever I think about it, I just shake. That's the word--_shake_. Yah, hah! You thought I was going to tell it in this chapter, didn't you? CHAPTER XXXIII OUR YOUNG HERO