We told him three or four miles, and that the motorboat could get through to the river that way, because this slough was not dammed at the head.
“Speed up, Wampus,” Jibby said. “We will get out into the river, and hasten back down below the mouth of the slough, and below the swamp. Can we walk back to the hills below the swamp?”
We all thought so, although we had never tried it, so we ran on up the slough and out into the river, and chugged back to where the swamp below the slough ended. We left the motorboat there and struck inland.
It was a tough trip. First, we had to climb five or six feet of steep mud bank, and that brought us to a thicket of willows and weeds and trees and grapevines that we had to fight through inch by inch, pushing them aside and climbing over and dodging under. Then this opened onto a blind slough—a slough that closed at both ends when the river fell in the spring—and we had to work downriver a half-mile or so until we came to a place where there was no water and the surface of the mud had dried and cracked into big bent cakes. We crossed there and fought through more thicket and came out into a forest of water-maples and water-elms. The river had been over this in the spring, and there was half a mile or so of stinging nettles, shoulder high, and great rifts of driftwood. We couldn’t walk in a straight direction more than twenty feet at a time; we had to go around piles of driftwood, or around mud holes, or pools, or places where the ground was like mush. Forty times we went in over the tops of our shoes, but by and by we came to a huge big cornfield that had been planted after the water had fallen. We walked between the rows of corn, and as we went the land got higher and higher until it began to slant up fairly steep, and then the cornfield ended and we were at the foot of the hills.
The hills here rounded upward and were grassy and not very bad walking, and we got to the top. We were just back of a farmhouse, and we edged along the farm fence, upriver toward the Greenland crossroad, and then struck inland until we hit the hilltop road. We walked along that until we came to the Greenland store.
Right away we saw that the map did not exactly jibe with the things we saw. In the first place, the store was not as far back from the crossroad as the map showed it to be; it was so close to the crossroad that you could step off the porch into the road. And there was no signal pine there, because there was no room for one. We sat down by the side of the road to have a look at the map.
Jibby left us there looking at the map while he walked down the crossroad. In a couple of minutes he came back.
“Well,” he said, “this isn’t a road at all. It is just a sort of driveway alongside of this store, and, as soon as it dips down the hill, it ends in a swampy pasture, and beyond the pasture the hill drops so sharply that no road could go down it, and no road ever did go down it. And I’ll tell you another thing. Every nail in every board in this store is a wire nail, and there were no wire nails in 1835. This isn’t the place. This store has been built since then. We’ve got to go farther up the hill road.”
“Why?” Wampus asked. “Maybe the place is back in the direction we came from.”
“No, because the X mark was on the creek, and we haven’t crossed the creek yet. We’ll go on up the road until we come to the creek.”
We were pretty tired, but we went on up the road. We went about half a mile before we came to the creek. It went under the road through a big tile culvert almost the size of a man. But there was no crossroad anywhere near there, and no house, and no sign of a pine tree. There was a barbed-wire fence and a cornfield where the house and the tree should have been.
“No good!” I said.
But Jibby Jones had spread himself flat on the ground alongside the barbed-wire fence, and he hunched along until he was against the lowest wire, almost, and then he held it as high as he could and hunched under. He got up and disappeared in the cornfield, and we sat down and waited. A farmer drove by, and asked us if we were after woodchucks when he saw our spades, but he didn’t wait for an answer.
And then we heard Jibby Jones, off in the cornfield, calling “Hi-hoo! Hi-hoo!” and we hunched under the barbed wire and hurried through the corn to where he was.
XI
Where Is Greenland?
There was no doubt in our minds what Jibby Jones had found when we pushed through the corn and came to where he was. The corn grew close up to its edges, but it was a cellar, as plain as anything could be. The cellar wall had been made of creek stones, piled up, and it had mostly crumbled inward, half filling the cellar and, on top of the stones, brush and trash, and old tin boilers and tin cans, and a couple of bedsprings and some old rusted barbed wire had been dumped, but there were four or five ends of squared logs, burned down to the ends, and we guessed what had happened to that house—it had burned down.
The cellar was small, not over ten feet square, and we judged the house had been small—maybe an old log cabin and maybe
