"That's what's so exciting about Tom's gadgets. You never know what will happen next. I'm afraid we're in for a lot of paddling. Horrors, there's only the one paddle."
"Oh, well, give it to me. Me heap awful big chief. Bendum mighty arm." Homer's paddling was inexpert and splashy. He caught a crab and doused Mary with water.
"You heap big lousy paddler," chortled Mary. "Here. Me paddlum with lunchbox. Don't dip down so deep."
The lunchbox provided just enough extra movement of water to allow them to creep forward. The sluggish current was with them, but the wind wasn't, and they made slow progress. They inched past Conantum. An hour later they we struggling past the Main Street lawns. Homer had taken over the lunchbox and he was plying it in rhythmic sweeps and bellowing in basso profundissimo a hymn he had made up called "Arise, O Man, and Curse!" He called it a typical Protestant hymn. Mary sang a dreary alto part—fa, fa, fa, fa, mi, fa. The whole effect was altogether too plausible. She asked a question that had puzzled her. How could anybody who called himself a Catholic have anything in common with the Transcendentalists?
"That's easy," said Homer. "Awe and majesty and glorification of the spirit, that's all. The mystic sense of God the Creator, what Emerson called the geometry of the City of God. You Protestants had a good thing in Martin Luther, and then you let it all go down the drain and replaced it with ethical culture and rationalism and humanism and Japanese flower arrangements. Corpsecold Unitarianism, that's what Emerson called it. A society of the diffusion of useful knowledge."
An hour later they were still bickering. "Oh, for God's sake, let's go ashore," said Homer. They had reached the joining of the rivers.
"But we've still got to go upstream on the Assabet," said Mary. "That'll take ages."
"Go ahead. You go upstream. Be a hero. I'm getting out right here." Grumpily Homer took off his shoes and socks and jumped out of the canoe. It rocked wildly from side to side. Homer's feet found a mushy footing and he pulled the canoe after him toward the left-hand shore. Mary found this action highhanded and she began to protest.
"Squaw talkum too much," growled Homer. "Squaw shut-tum-up and come ashore." Then suddenly he began to howl and hop around on one foot. He lifted the other foot out of the water. There was a small snapping turtle attached to his toe. "Ow, ow!" roared Homer, trying to kick it off. The turtle hung on like grim death.
Mary was overjoyed. She clapped her hands. "Freddy's turtle! Oh, good for you. Here, don't lose it. Just hold still." She reached over the side with the lunchbox, held it open like a clamshell, and then clamped it hard around the turtle and Homer's toe, slam. Homer hollered and jumped around, and Mary, hanging on, fell clean out of the canoe. She went under, and stayed there, and Homer found himself groaning and fishing around for her desperately. But in a minute she was up, smiling radiantly, her hair streaming, her wet dress clinging, clasping a lunchbox that was shut and locked on the bloody mingled waters of the Assabet, the Sudbury and the Concord rivers and on a snapping turtle that was digesting a piece of Homer Kelly's toe. "It's all right," said Mary brightly, "I've got him!"
"Who's worried?" snarled Homer. He turned to wade toward the shore, hobbling, hanging onto his toe. Then he stopped, and hopped up and down in one place, and pointed. "What's that?" he said.
Facing them was a great grey rock. There was an inscription carved into its face. "That's Egg Rock," said Mary. "We went right by it twice before."
Homer waded clumsily to the edge of the water, and read the inscription.
ON THE HILL NASHAWTUCK
AT THE MEETING OF THE RIVERS
AND ALONG THE BANKS
LIVED THE INDIAN OWNERS OF
MUSKETAQUID
BEFORE THE WHITE MEN CAME.
"Musketaquid," said Homer. "That's the old Indian name for the river."
"Yes, and of the tribe. It means Grass-ground River, or river surrounded with grassy meadows. Thoreau liked to call it that. too. He called his little boat The Musketaquid."
Homer was bleeding into the water, but he let go of his toe and ran his finger over the word Musketaquid. "Musketaquid. Musket-a-quid. Musket..." He looked at Mary. "Say, you don't suppose that was what Ernest Goss was trying to say when he died?" Mary stared back at him. Could it have been" Then Homer tugged at the canoe and dragged it up on the sloping shore. Mary wrung out a streaming handkerchief and tied it on his wounded toe. It was hard to do because he kept hopping around.
"What do you think you're doing?"
"I don't know. Looking for something. Doing research."
"Oh, I see. Well, hold still. Golly, I'm afraid you're going to bleed right through this bandage. He really took a piece out of you."
Homer got away and hobbled all over the small point of land that marked the joining place of the rivers, leaving wet red drops on the ferns that grew in clefts in the granite outcropping Then he found something. It was a small tin bait box, wedged deep down in one of the clefts. It was fastened shut by a heavy padlock.
"Zowie!" shouted Homer. "My letters! What do you want to bet?" He rattled the box around. "Something in there all right."
"You're sure it's not just a lot of smelly worms?"
"Doesn't sound like worms. Sounds like papers."
"Well, it could be a club that some boys have, and this is their secret hiding place, and the papers tell who's president and what the password is. Oh, Homer, look, you've got to sit down and put your foot up. You'll bleed half to death. You stay here. I'll find a house and call Tom and get some bandages and he'll bring the car as close as he can."
"You go wigwams? You one heap awful big wet squaw."
"You one heap awful big bloody mess, go Happy Hunting Ground." Mary climbed over a great fallen log, rotten and soft, and started up a barely visible path. Old Squaw Sachem had had a trail somewhere here, and up on Nashawtuc Hill there were some houses...
Homer stretched out on the ground and put his foot up on the canoe. He held the bait box on his stomach and patted it. "Me findum plenty wampum. Me plenty heap awful smart."
*40*
Everything that befalls, accuses him. —Ralph Waldo Emerson
Homer was for opening the bait box with a can opener, but Jimmy Flower would have none of that. He brought out a manila envelope that held the contents of Ernest Goss's pockets, and poured them out on his desk. Small change, wallet, penknife, key chain. And on the key chain there was a small key for which they had as yet found no matching lock. "Will wonders never cease," said Jimmy. The rusted padlock was reluctant, but it gave way. Inside the bait box was a plastic folder, and in the folder was the batch of letters. Mary recognized them at once. These were the letters, the letters Ernest Goss had read to the Alcott Association, Transcendental dynamite.
"Now don't you go handling them," said Jimmy. "We'll let Campbell at Public Safety work them over. I'll get them off to him right now."
"So if I'm right," said Homer, "Goss wasn't saying musket at all as he lay dying. He was trying to say something else entirely. And that's why Arthur Furry didn't really need to strain himself to remember a big gun. There was no big gun. No musket at all."
"Hold on there, not so fast. Don't forget, he was killed with a musket ball and there's a musket missing."
"But why should a dying man waste his last words on the weapon that killed him? That's what's bothered me all along. He didn't even bother to tell the name of his murderer. Something else was more important to communicate—the whereabouts of the letters on which he planned to raise a big reputation. He wanted them found and saved and published and credited to his own glory."