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Show 59 he really didn't think these things were a good idea. * * * Climbing down into the declivity was not as hard as he had expected. The ground was soft and the heels of his gum boots cut firmly into the slope. The odor of crushed grass was pleasant and he didn't mind that the seat of his bib overalls grew heavy with caked mud. He found the half-buried boulder with its crust of orange lichen and set to work with the trowel he had stolen from his mother's potting shed. It was a small tool for a large job, and the afternoon was well advanced before he had undercut the boulder enough to loosen it and dug a trench deep enough to tip it back without the risk of its getting away from him and rolling down the hill. The hole he had exposed on dislodging the boulder smelled of damp mold. It had been cut in a rough rectangle, and flat rocks had been lodged against the walls to keep them from crumbling, but only three of them were still upright, the fourth having been pushed partly over under the weight of shifting earth. The plates lay on a flat rock under the shadow of the tilting wall, and the breastplate, badly rusted, lay on what looked like a coil of decomposing leather strips off to one side. The floor was littered with dead sowbugs, their dried shells nearly transparent. A red millipede scuttled frantically in circles and disappeared into the crack where two of the rock walls joined imperfectly. The hole was deep enough that you couldn't reach the plates or the fragment of armor from the edge. You had to climb down into it. Lorin wasn't supposed to take them out of the hole until he was older, but he had thought he should probably check to make sure they were all right. He would roll the boulder back over the hole in a minute, and fill in his |