Roy Blakeley's Roundabout Hike by Percy Keese Fitzhugh

I made flipflops for lunch and Pee-wee ate eleven of them. Dub ate seven. Sandy said he could eat them as fast as I could make them, but I was four ahead of him when he stopped. So then we each took one. That made twelve for Pee-wee. He wanted one more but I said it would be bad luck.

We had bad luck anyway. We dug around all afternoon in all the crevices and places and we drained out that pool and poked all around between the rocks in the bottom of it. We couldn't find any oilskin container. We turned over lots of rocks in the bed of the brook and looked underneath to see if anything might have got wedged there. Wherever two rocks were close together we pried them apart. We found lots of things that had got caught when they were floating down the stream, pieces of wood and things like that. And we felt all around at the roots of bushes that were under water when the brook was running. One place, in a crevice between two rocks, we found a whistle made out of willow wood. It was so dry the bark curled right off it. I said I guessed it came from Temple Camp. But Sandy said _no_, because the brook flowed into Black Lake. Maybe some kid away up in the mountains made that whistle and lost it in the brook, hey?