I had thought about building something of the kind for a long while, but could not seem to get it planned out in my mind just to suit me. The burning of the livery stable, of course, set me thinking harder than ever. The place had to be, of course, something that would not burn and some place that could not be found. The only thing that wouldn't burn was the snow, but in case of fire I knew that it would melt for some distance from the buildings. I had just had an example of this. Besides, there had to be a way to get into it which could not be seen either before or after the fire, and this entrance must be from a building so that I would not have to expose myself in going to it. The place must also be where I could stay a few days if I had to. A dozen times I thought I had got the whole thing planned out, and once I wrote about it to my mother, but I always found that something was weak about the plan somewhere. But I now concluded that I had struck on the right thing at last. A hundred feet back of the next building to the north of the one in which I had my bedroom was a small barn where the man who owned the place had kept a cow. It was so small that I always thought he must have measured his cow, like a tailor, and built the barn to fit. Fifty feet back (east) of this barn was a haystack. Before the snow came the top of it had been taken off so it was left about four or five feet high and the shape of a bowl turned wrong side up. It was in the lee of the barn, and the snow had piled up over it in a great drift so that you would never once have guessed that there was such a thing as a haystack within half a mile. It was, maybe, a hundred feet from the Headquarters barn to this stack, with four or five or more feet of snow all the way. My idea was to tunnel from the barn to the stack, dig out some hay on the south side and have a snug room half made of hay and half of snow. There was no underpinning beneath the Headquarters barn (most of the buildings in town simply stood on big stones a few feet apart) and the space where it should have been was filled in with a wide board and banked outside with hay. Under Ned's manger I sawed out a piece of this board big enough to crawl through, and hung it on leather hinges at the top, concealed by the manger. I then dug through the hay and had a clear field for my tunnel straight to the stack.