So we went to find Rover. We worked back to the slough, calling him all the while—“Here, Rover! Here, Rover! Here, Rover!”—but not a yip nor bark from him. We went up the slough and down the slough calling him, and it began to get dark. Then, suddenly, Wampus stopped short.
“Say!” he said.
“What?”
“I know! That fellow got him—that redheaded fellow on the barge!”
“I bet he did!” I said.
Well, it seemed likely that that was what had happened. So Wampus and I stood there in the dark a minute.
“Well, we’ve got to get him,” I said. “I’m not going to have anybody steal my dog. Come on!”
We worked through the weeds and bushes, across toward the chute and down toward the two willow barges. We came out not far from them as we saw the red light the man had put on the barges as a signal. Then we crept along Indian fashion, bent over, toward the barges.
“He would put him inside,” Wampus said, and I knew that as well as Wampus did. That was what any dog-thief would do—put Rover down inside the barge and close the hatch cover. We crept close to the barges. I picked up a good-sized stone and so did Wampus.
Well, just as we got close up to the U.S. 420 we heard Rover. We heard just one bark and then we saw a man lifting the hatch cover. The man slid down inside the barge and eased the cover back into place over his head, and then we heard no more barking. The cover was thick and heavy and I guess he wanted to shut in Rover’s barks while he was tying him fast.
“Come on!” I said, and the next minute I was on the barge and Wampus after me. Then I did not know what to do. We couldn’t yank up that cover and go down and take Rover away from the man, because he might kill us or something. But Wampus knew what to do.
“Here!” he said, and he tossed me a handful of his rusty nails. “Hurry up! Get busy! Nail this cover down!”
So we did. We used the two rocks as hammers and drove in the nails, and then we jumped for shore and ran, because we were frightened. We ran up the path and we did not stop until we were almost at our cottage.
“Gee!” I said then. “We did it! We’ve got him! But what are we going to do about it?”
“Do?” said Wampus. “We’ll get Mr. Edwin Skreever and Orpheus Cadwallader and have Orpheus take his shotgun, and we’ll have them pry off that cover and get your dog. That’s what we’ll do.”
“But Orpheus has gone to town.”
“Well, we’ll do it in the morning.”
That would have been all right, too, but just then the Bright Star came around the lower end of Buffalo Island and steered for the two barges. I went cold, I tell you! The only thing I could think of doing was to get Mr. Edwin Skreever, so we ran to our cottage and called and shouted, but he was not there. We guessed he had gone down to town as he had threatened to do, maybe, so we ran down the path to the barges. The men were already throwing off the cables. They were pretty cross, too, because they don’t like to work at night, and they wouldn’t listen to us. They told us to get away from there and they chased us. We had to stand and see the Bright Star tow the barges out into the river and away. We watched them until they were just dim red and green lights far down the river. Then we went back to the cottage.
We were scared, I tell you! We thought maybe that man would stay nailed down inside that barge until he starved to death and some day his bones would be found and we would be arrested and, maybe, hung. And then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, we saw Mr. Edwin Skreever’s motorboat tied in front of the cottage! He hadn’t gone down to town. Then we were scared! Ten times over!
We sat in the cabin until it was awful late, hoping Mr. Edwin Skreever was only out somewhere hunting Rover, but he did not come. We couldn’t fool ourselves. We knew we had nailed May’s bridegroom inside that barge and sent him down the river—nobody could tell how far, perhaps all the way to New Orleans! And the wedding was the next day!
Well, it was terrible! We tried to think that we had not done anything wrong—that we had only tried to keep our dog from being stolen—but it was no comfort. About midnight we heard the creak of Orpheus Cadwallader’s oars as he rowed home from town, but that did not comfort us much, either. We went to sleep right there in the living-room of the cottage, thinking what would happen to us the next day when the wedding-time came and there was no Mr. Edwin Skreever. I dreamed awful things all night, but the worst was a dream about May. She was all dressed up in her wedding clothes, with a white veil and flowers, and when it came time to be married, Mr. Edwin Skreever was not there, so she wept and wept. Mother and father were very stern and cross, and mother said, “Well, there is no help for it; you will have to marry Rover!” so they dragged Rover in, yowling and pulling back, and father and Mr. Smale held him up on his hind legs and then, all of a sudden, Rover gave a big wiggle and turned into a pile of rusty nails. Then May wept again, and in came Mr. Edwin Skreever, but he was nothing but bones—just plain skeleton bones. He pointed his bone finger at me and opened his bone face and I thought he was going to speak, but he didn’t. He
