Jerry caught a phrase dropped by one of them, a small lad named Toots. “Gee, I clean forgot to make my report of scouts. You remember, Al, that when we saw that smoke from the woods across the lake, I said I’d report it at council?”
“What’s that?” Jerry questioned him. “You saw smoke across the lake?”
“Yes,” said the boy eagerly, “me and Al here, we were out in a rowboat over that way, and saw some smoke coming up like somebody had a campfire in the woods.”
“Hmm. Take my advice and don’t say anything about it. Not worth mentioning.” But Jerry looked at Jake, who nodded back. The expanse of heavily-wooded land across the lake was almost always deserted, so much so that deer tracks were often to be discovered within its depths. A campfire there was certainly a most unusual thing.
“We’ll go up and pitch down the chunks, and the other guys can stow them away in the refrigerator.”
“You’re on!” answered his brother, and began climbing the ladder.
Tent Ten had been assigned, as their squad-work the next morning after the council, to filling the large refrigerator in the pantry behind Ellick’s large, airy kitchen. This duty required that they ascend to the towerlike structure that housed the summer’s supply of ice for Camp Lenape. In mid-winter, when the lake was sheeted over with a crystal mass some six inches thick, a gang of men always came with saws and teams of horses to harvest the ice and store it, between layers of sawdust, in the Lenape ice-house for the use of the campers the following season.
It was the plan of the brothers to enter the ice-house, dig out the embedded blocks required, and send these down the chute to their waiting tent-mates, whose job it would be to wash away the sawdust and transport the ice to Ellick’s gaping refrigerator. Armed with ice-tongs and a large miner’s pick, Jake and Jerry climbed to the upper door of the edifice, and entered its chill gloom.
“Come on, work fast, if you don’t want to freeze!” advised Jerry. He raised the pick and began clearing away the thick crust of sawdust in one corner of the place, but paused as his brother made no move to aid him. “Hey! Earn your keep, man! Don’t stand star-gazing all morning!”
Jake was staring upward. The ice-house was solidly built, but at one corner of the roof the sunlight slanted through a narrow crevice. The watcher had for an instant seen that spot of light cut off by the passage of a small body. Jake pointed. “Something up there, Jerry!”
