The Trail Book | Page 2

and yet somehow only to be reached after long travel
through the Buffalo Country. The wind moved on the grass, on the
surface of the water and the young leaves of the alders, and over all the
animals came the start and stir of life.
And then the slow, shuffling steps of the Museum attendant startled it
all into stillness again.
The attendant spoke to Oliver as he passed, for even a small boy is
worth talking to when you have been all day in a Museum where
nothing is new to you and nobody comes.
"You want to look out, son," said the attendant, who really liked the
boy and hadn't a notion what sort of ideas he was putting into Oliver's
head. "If you ain't careful, some of them things will come downstairs
some night and go off with ye."
And why should MacShea have said that if he hadn't known for certain
that the animals did come alive at night? That was the way Oliver put it
when he was trying to describe this extraordinary experience to his
sister.
Dorcas Jane, who was eleven and a half and not at all imaginative, eyed
him suspiciously. Oliver had such a way of stating things that were not
at all believable, in a way that made them seem the likeliest things in
the world. He was even capable of acting for days as if things were so,
which you knew from the beginning were only the most delightful of
make-believes. Life on this basis was immensely more exciting, but
then you never knew whether or not he might be what some of his boy
friends called "stringing you," so when Oliver began to hint darkly at
his belief that the stuffed animals in the Mammal room of the Museum
came alive at night and had larks of their own, Dorcas Jane offered the
most noncommittal objection that occurred to her.
"They couldn't," she said; "the night watchman wouldn't let them."
There were watchmen, she knew, who went the rounds of every floor.

But, insisted Oliver, why should they have watchmen at all, if not to
prevent people from breaking in and disturbing the animals when they
were busy with affairs of their own? He meant to stay up there himself
some night and see what it was all about; and as he went on to explain
how it would be possible to slip up the great stair while the watchmen
were at the far end of the long hall, and of the places one could hide if
the watchman came along when he wasn't wanted, he said "we" and
"us." For, of course, he meant to take Dorcas Jane with him. Where
would be the fun of such an adventure if you had it alone? And besides,
Oliver had discovered that it was not at all difficult to scare himself
with the things he had merely imagined. There were times when Dorcas
Jane's frank disbelief was a great comfort to him. Still, he wasn't the
sort of boy to be scared before anything has really happened, so when
Dorcas Jane suggested that they didn't know what the animals might do
to any one who went among them uninvited, he threw it off stoutly.
"Pshaw! They can't do anything to us! They're stuffed, Silly!"
And to Dorcas Jane, who was by this time completely under the spell of
the adventure, it seemed quite likely that the animals should be stuffed
so that they couldn't hurt you, and yet not stuffed so much that they
couldn't come alive again.
It was all of a week before they could begin. There is a kind of feeling
you have to have about an adventure without which the affair doesn't
come off properly. Anybody who has been much by himself in the
woods has had it; or sometime, when you are all alone in the house, all
at once there comes a kind of pricking of your skin and a tightness in
your chest, not at all unpleasant, and a kind of feeling that the furniture
has its eye on you, or that some one behind your shoulder is about to
speak, and immediately after that something happens. Or you feel sure
it would have happened if somebody hadn't interrupted.
Dorcas Jane never had feelings like that. But about a week after Oliver
had proposed to her that they spend a part of the night in the long
gallery, he was standing in front of the Buffalo case, wondering what
actually did happen when a buffalo caught you. Quite unexpectedly,
deep behind the big bull's glassy eye, he caught a gleam as of another

eye looking at him, meaningly, and with a great deal of friendliness.
Oliver felt prickles come out suddenly all over his body,