We had bad luck anyway. We dug around all afternoon in all the crevices and places and we drained out that pool and poked all around between the rocks in the bottom of it. We couldn’t find any oilskin container. We turned over lots of rocks in the bed of the brook and looked underneath to see if anything might have got wedged there. Wherever two rocks were close together we pried them apart. We found lots of things that had got caught when they were floating down the stream, pieces of wood and things like that. And we felt all around at the roots of bushes that were under water when the brook was running. One place, in a crevice between two rocks, we found a whistle made out of willow wood. It was so dry the bark curled right off it. I said I guessed it came from Temple Camp. But Sandy said _no_, because the brook flowed into Black Lake. Maybe some kid away up in the mountains made that whistle and lost it in the brook, hey? We kept on hunting till suppertime and then I fried bacon and we roasted potatoes and Pee-wee’s face got all blackened up eating them. So I opened a can of soup so he could get the black off his face and that only made his face worse--honest he looked like a coal-bin. There was a spring and we got water from that. There was a cross cut in the rock over it and Pee-wee said it was an Indian sign. Dub said, “Maybe the last of the Mohegans are camping around here.” “Sure,” I said, “maybe there’s a tribe of Indian motorcycles parked up the line. Wherever Pee-wee goes he sees Indian signs. Once he saw some Indian meal in the street and he thought a tribe of Indians had passed through. He thinks a hotel reservation is where Indians live. I can tell you what that cross means,” I said, “and you want to remember it wherever you hike around these parts. It means the water in that spring has been tested and it’s all right. That cross was put there by a savage tribe of doctors. Pee-wee knows all about signs. He went to night school and he can even read them in the dark.” I had to laugh at the kid, he was sitting there with his face all blackened up, munching an apple. I said, “Are you sure you had enough to eat? Pretty soon it will be dark and then you won’t be able to find your mouth any more.” “You think you’re smart showing off in front of new fellers,” the kid said. He could hardly speak, he was having such a mortal combat with a big bite of apple. “If you took smaller bites they wouldn’t be so big,” I told him. “You ought to take your bites in two sections, then you’d think you were eating two apples--don’t answer till convenient.” “Ythnkersmartdontyer,” Pee-wee munched at me. “Explain all that,” I said. “Do you know Pee-wee’s favorite word?” I asked Dub and Sandy. “_Troop_ because it rhymes with _soup_. Look out now, he’s going to speak.” “Do you mean to say Indians were never around here?” the kid shouted. “Didn’t Uncle Jeb even find an old arrow in the woods?”