right up till snow was on the ground the ku klux klan used to meet in the cave. we would go up there saturday mornings, all coming by different roads, and when we met there would be passwords and signals and grips and all sorts of secret things. after a while we got so many signs that a fellow had to be pretty careful what he was up to so as not to be telling the other members he was in deadly peril, or that a secret meeting was called at once, or something else, because almost everything we did had a meaning. for instance, if i was to reach around and scratch my back when mark or plunk or binney were looking, that meant that i had to speak to them right away about something important; and if one of us shoved both hands in his pockets at once that meant to look out because enemies were watching. all our signals were simple things like that that wouldn’t be noticed. mark got most of them up, and i guess there were more than a hundred things to be remembered.
we used to sit in the cave and wish there were some real wrongs being done that we could right, or that we had some kind of a powerful enemy, or that there was a mean, miserable whelp that we could visit at night with our white sheets on and tie him to a tree and frighten him into being a good citizen; but there weren’t any, and we had to take it out in making believe. but that was almost as much fun.
we had one sign that was never to be used except when we were desperate and needed help and succor, and that was to untie your necktie and tie it up again. but the best one of all was the jack-knife sign, and it was a dandy, because there were so many ways of using it. if one of us met the other and said “lemme take your jack-knife,” that was one way; or if you sent a note by somebody else with the word jack-knife in it, or anything like that. but the best way was the one to be used if you were a captive, or if enemies were surrounding the cave and you wanted to have your comrades rally around you. nobody would ever suspect it. all you had to do was to meet somebody, a farmer or a man fishing or any one, and give him your knife and tell him please to give it to any one of the society. as soon as that one got the knife he had to collect the others and make for the cave as fast as he could. it worked bully. lots of times i’ve sent my little brother over to mark’s with my knife, and dozens of times mark or binney or plunk have sent their knives to me. once binney sent his by his father, who was going past my house. i don’t believe the real, original ku-kluxers had a better sign than that.
the cave was up on the side hill like i told you, and looked down on the river. i told you, too, how uncle ike bond was always fishing when he could get time, which was most always, and he used to come past almost every time we were there. after a while it got so he’d stop to talk to us or we’d go down to talk to him. finally one day he grinned, knowing-like, and asked what we were doing there so much.
we looked at one another, and then mark reached around and scratched his back. that meant, of course, that he had to speak about something important right away, so we got up and told uncle ike we’d be back in a minute. he grinned and nodded.
we went off out of earshot, and mark tidd whispered:
“uncle ike’s a pretty good f-f-friend, ain’t he?”
we said yes, he was.
“i think he’s catchin’ on that we’re up to somethin’.”
“maybe so,” i said.
“let’s make him a m-member. then he can’t give us away. besides, he’d be a pretty valuable one, anyhow.”
we talked it over awhile, and it was decided unanimous to make him a ku-kluxer, so we went back to where he was sitting.
“uncle ike,” says mark, “can you keep a secret?”
“wa-all, i hain’t never been tempted very hard, but i guess i can keep one good enough for ordinary purposes.”
“this is the secretest thing that ever was,” says binney.
“um!” says uncle ike. “you don’t tell!”
“we’re the ku klux klan,” says plunk, to save mark the trouble of stuttering so many k’s.
“and we want you to join if you’ll take the oath.”
“sure,” says uncle ike. “i’ve always hankered to b’long to somethin’ secret, but i hain’t never seemed to git around to it.”
mark recited the oath, and uncle ike swore to it solemn as could be. he seemed real glad to be a member. after that we spent most of the afternoon teaching him our secret signs and tokens and things. he said he didn’t think he could learn all of them, but that a few dozen of the most important would do. he seemed particular delighted with the jack-knife sign.
“but looky here,” he said, shaking his finger in our faces, “don’t go workin’ any of them signs on me unless you mean ’em in earnest. you young fellers kin fool with ’em as much as you want to, but don’t go sendin’ me no jack-knives till you git where you need my help and need it bad. i’m too old to go gallivantin’ around chasin’ wild geese.”
after that he stopped to our meetings more often than ever, and pretty nearly every time he’d have a big bass, or maybe a nice mess of pan-fish for us to cook for our dinner. we were all glad we made him a member.
all this while mr. tidd was working steady on his turbine, and it was getting nearer and nearer to being ready for a trial to see if the model would work and do what he thought it was going to do. he didn’t do anything else but work in the barn and read the decline and fall and forget things. i mean he didn’t have any job, but lived on money that he had in the bank. if it hadn’t been for that he’d have had to go on being a machinist all the rest of his life, and probably wouldn’t ever have had time to do any inventing.
with all his forgetting and absent-mindedness and inventing he was one of the most patient men. i never heard him speak sharp, and, no matter what happened, good or bad, he took it just the same, not seeming much disturbed; and always simple and kind-spoken to everybody. he always would stop to answer questions or explain things or just talk to us boys if we came into the shop, and never told us to get out or quit bothering him. nothing bothered him. but mrs. tidd wasn’t that way. she’d worry and worry, and sometimes when she was flying around up to her ears in work she’d out with something cross, not meaning it at all, but letting it fly off the tip of her tongue. but she was never short with mr. tidd and never exasperated with him, no matter what he forgot or did wrong.
all four of us—that is, mark and plunk and binney and me—went out to mr. tidd’s shop to ask if mark could come with us and camp friday night and saturday and saturday night and sunday at our cave. the rest of us had asked and could go if we wanted to. we wanted to, but we didn’t want to without mark.
mr. tidd was tinkering and filing and fussing around with some little parts of his turbine, and we had to speak two or three times before he heard us; then he turned around surprised-like and said, “bless my soul, bless my soul,” as if we had just come from a thousand miles away in an airship. he laid down his tools and leaned his arm on his bench and stared at us a minute. then he said “bless my soul” again and reached for his handkerchief.
“you’ve got it tied around your neck,” binney told him.
mr. tidd felt and found it where binney said. “well, well,” he sort of whispered. “however come that there?”
“pa,” began mark, “can i go camping at the cave? the fellers are goin’.”
“camping,” said mr. tidd; “camping at the cave? to be sure—at the cave. um! what cave?”
“our cave,” we all said at once.
we told him all about it, and he was as interested as could be, asking questions and nodding his head and smiling, just like he wanted to go to the cave himself.
“can i go, pa?” mark asked, when we were through.
“far’s i’m concerned you can,” said mr. tidd, “but you better ask your ma. she sort of looks after such things. i guess she looks after everything; and, mark, when you ask her see if she knows where my shoes are. i swan i couldn’t find ’em this mornin’ when i came out—couldn’t find hide nor hair of ’em. it does beat all how things get lost.”
mrs. tidd was dusting the parlor when we went in, and had a cloth tied around her hair. she was just flying around, poking behind things and into corners and going as fast as if she had to have it all done in two minutes.
“ma,” mark says, poking his head through the door, “can i go campin’ with the fellers?”
“no,” says mrs. tidd, without turning her head. then she stopped a second and felt of her hair. “what’s that you say?”
mark asked her again, and we chipped in and explained.
“was ever such a boy!” she said to herself. “here i got all the cleanin’ and dustin’, and bread in the oven. will you be careful and cover up good at night and not get into any mischief?”
mark nodded.
“what you going to have to eat?”
i told her we’d bake potatoes and have fish and one thing another.
“you sha’n’t do no sich thing—gain’ without proper food!” and off she flew to the kitchen and got a basket in a jiffy. into it she put a big chunk of ham, and a loaf of bread and some butter, and a whole pie and half a chocolate cake, and what was left of a pot of baked beans. “there,” says she, “i guess that’ll keep you from starvin’.”
we said good-by and started for the door, but she came running after us. “mark,” she says, “you take these gray blankets, and, mind you, bring them back again or you’ll hear from me.” then she kissed him and flew back to her dusting again.
we had all of our things in the front yard, and it didn’t take us any time to get them packed on our backs and start for the river. it was only about half an hour’s walk, but it took us a little longer to get there on account of mark, who wanted to rest every little while; but it wasn’t really resting he wanted; it was a piece of his mother’s cake. we ate it all up before we got to the cave at all.
we got at the cave from the top of the hill and threw our things down on the slope in front. it was a little chilly in the shade, so mark told us to gather wood for a fire while he packed things away the way they ought to be. i guess we were gone twenty minutes. when we came back everything was just where we left it, and mark was standing looking into the cave with his face wrinkled up like it gets when he’s puzzled.
“been workin’ hard, ain’t you?” sings out plunk.
usually mark would have said something back, but this time he didn’t. he turned around and asks, “have any of you been here since last saturday?”
nobody had.
“s-somebody’s been in the cave.”
“how do you know?” i asked him.
“things been moved around, and some p-p-potaters is gone,” he stuttered.
“let’s look,” says binney; and we all crowded in. mark knew where everything ought to be, even if we didn’t, and he told us just what had been touched and what hadn’t. “he used the f-fryin’-pan,” he grumbled. “look!”
sure enough, there was the frying-pan with grease sticking to the bottom, and we never left it that way.
“wonder who it could have been?” says plunk.
“maybe it was uncle ike,” guessed binney.
“no,” says mark, “he’d ’a’ cleaned the pan.”
that was right. we knew he wouldn’t leave any dirty dishes around.
well, it kind of upset us. of course, the cave wasn’t ours, and anybody could come into it that wanted to, but nobody ever did. it was such a little cave that it didn’t amount to much to look at, and it was quite a climb; and now here was somebody poking into our things, and it made us pretty sore.
“probably some feller come along fishin’ and happened onto it,” binney guessed.
it didn’t do any good to bother about it, so we set to work and packed our things away and got a fire ready to light. in front of the cave was a little patch of sand—white sand crumbled off the sandstone that the cave was carved out of, i guess—and it was there we had our fires and did our cooking. mark always fixed the fires, because he knew how to pile the sticks and get them to blazing even if the wind was blowing like sixty. now he was crouched down ready to strike a match when all of a sudden he said something like he was startled.
“what’s matter?” i asked him.
he didn’t answer, but bent over and looked at something in the sand. somehow i felt shivery all at once without any reason, and walked over where he was to see what he was looking at. there in the sand was some kind of a footprint; it was a bare foot, but big, bigger than two ordinary men’s feet, with the toes growing sort of sideways. i looked at mark, and he looked at me.
“what made it?” i whispered. for a minute it didn’t seem safe to speak out loud.
“i dunno,” says mark, with his eyes big and his face serious. “looks like a man if the toes weren’t on sideways.”
we called plunk and binney, but they couldn’t make anything out of it, so we built the fire good and big, just in case it was some kind of a wild animal. we knew animals were afraid of fire.
it was binney who thought about the frying-pan. “it must be a man, or it wouldn’t have used the pan,” he says.
that was right. animals don’t cook. plunk drew a long breath. “maybe it’s a wild man,” he said, trembly voiced.
“like there was with that circus last summer,” i said, remembering the pictures in front of the tent of seven men catching a thing all hair and beard, with skins on it for clothes, and big teeth. we all got closer to the fire.
“bosh!” snorts mark; but his voice was a little dry, and he didn’t look any too comfortable. “there ain’t any wild men.” but he didn’t believe it and we didn’t believe it.
“what had we better do?” asks binney.
“nothing,” says plunk, letting on he wasn’t afraid. “it won’t hurt anybody even if it is a wild man. and, besides, there are four of us.”
that wasn’t so very encouraging, judging from the size of the footprint. anything with a foot as big as that could take four boys at a bite.
“had we better stay?” binney was pretty scared and showed it.
“of course,” plunk told him. “we ain’t babies. we got to stay.”
we couldn’t very well back down after that. i expect every one of us was willing enough to pack up and go, but nobody would start it, so we sat close to the blaze and talked about other things, and made believe to one another that wild men were the last thing in the world we’d ever think of running away from.
it began to get dark, and we cooked supper. it wasn’t a very cheerful meal because every once in a while one of us would stop to listen and ask, “what was that?” there were lots of noises, like there always are in the woods, but they never seemed so shivery before. the moon didn’t come up till late, and it was dark as a pocket except where our fire lighted things up for a few feet.
“we ought to have a gun,” said plunk, after we had been quiet a long time.
“bosh!” said mark. “let’s go to b-b-bed.”
“we got to have a guard,” says binney. “the ku klux klan wouldn’t camp without a sentinel.”
we agreed to that. the night was divided into watches, and we drew pieces of stick to show who would watch first. i drew the shortest piece, and the other fellows went into the cave and wrapped themselves up in their blankets. i sat out by the fire, and i can tell you it was pretty lonesome and scary.
