Camp Three was on a hillside a quarter of a mile northeast of the cemetery. The woods were thick there, branches coming to within four feet of the ground in many places, and the shrubbery made walking hard going except on the few trails cattle and hunters had cut through the thickets. Camp Three looked like just another solid thicket of shrubs from every angle: a ring of bushes with multiple trunks the thickness of a boy's wrist, a tangle of branches overhead almost joining with the canopy of leaves from the trees. But if one got on one's knees at just the right spot and crawled through the maze of brambles and stems at just the right angle, the entrance to a truly wonderful place appeared.

Dale and Lawrence arrived first, panting and looking over their shoulders, hearing the shouts from McKown and the others only a hundred yards behind them. They made sure no one was in sight, dropped to all fours on the grassy hillside, and crawled into Camp Three.

The interior was as solid and secure as some domed hut, eight feet across in an almost perfect circle, the wall of shrubs allowing a few peepholes but providing complete invisibility from searching eyes outside. Some quirk of the slope settling-perhaps due to the stockadelike ring of shrubs itself-had provided an almost level floor of soil here where the rest of the hillside was rather steep. A low, soft grass grew within this ring, providing a surface as smooth as a putting green.

Dale once had lain in Camp Three during a solid summer rainstorm and had remained as dry as if he were home in his own room. One snowy winter he and Lawrence and Mike had postholed their way through the woods and found Camp Three after some effort-the shrubs and woods here looked quite different without their foliage-and had crawled in to find the interior almost free of snow, the surrounding stockade of wooden stems as concealing as ever.

Now he and his brother lay there gasping as silently as possible, listening to the excited shouts of McKown and the others as they crashed their way through the woods.

"They went this way!" came Chuck Sperling's voice. He was on the old trail that ran within twenty feet of Camp Three. Suddenly there was a rustling and snapping right outside, Dale and Lawrence raised the sticks they'd been carrying like spears, and Mike O'Rourke slid through the low tunnel opening. Mike's face was flushed, his blue eyes were bright, and he'd been scratched by a branch so that a thin line of blood marked his left temple. He was grinning widely. "Where'd they . . ." began Lawrence. Mike covered the smaller boy's mouth with his palm and shook his head. "Right outside," he whispered. All three boys threw themselves flat on the grass, their faces next to the stems of the shrubs.

"Damn it," came Digger Taylor's voice from less than five feet uphill, "I saw O'Rourke come this way."

"Barry!" It was Chuck Sperling's voice screaming from just outside the thicket. "You see 'em down there?"

"Uh-uh," came the fat Fussner twin's shout. "Nobody came down the trail this way."

"Shit," said Digger. "I saw him. And those Stewart dip-shits were running this way, too."

In Camp Three, Lawrence made a fist and started to stand. Dale pulled his brother down, even though one could stand in the circle and still not be seen. Dale motioned for silence, but had to grin at how red Lawrence's face was getting. That deep flush was a sure sign that his brother was ready to put his head down and charge somebody. Dale had seen it often enough.

"Maybe they went back up the hill towards the cemetery or doubled back to the strip-mined place." It was Gerry Daysinger's voice, not fifteen feet from the Camp.

"Hunt around here first," commanded Sperling in that snotty tone he used in Little League because his dad was the coach.

Mike, Dale, and Lawrence held their sticks like rifles as they listened to the crashing and thrashing along the ¦hillside as the other kids literally beat the bushes, hunting behind fallen logs and smashing through shrubs. Somebody actually bashed a stick against the south side of Camp Three, but it was like hitting a solid wall. Unless one knew the zigs and zags on the east side, crawling through the final hole smaller than a sewer pipe, you'd never find your way in.

Or so the three boys in Camp Three fervently hoped.

Shouts came from far up the trail.

"They got Kev," Lawrence whispered. Dale nodded and hushed his brother again.

The sound of boots and sneakers receded up the trail. There were more shouts. Mike sat up and brushed grass and thistles off his striped polo shirt.

"You think Kev'll give us away?" asked Dale.

Mike grinned. "Not Camp Three. He might show 'em Camp Five or the Cave. But not Camp Three."

' They already know where Camp Five is from last summer," said Lawrence, finally whispering now that he no longer had to. "And we're not using the Cave."

Mike just grinned.

They sprawled there for another half hour, tired from the couple of hours of running through the hills and the postadren-aline letdown from the chase. They compared close calls, commiserated over Kevin's demise-he'd be a prisoner if he didn't "join them" to help in the chase-and dug stuff out of their pockets to eat. None had brought a pack of real rations, but Mike.had stuffed an apple in the pocket of his jeans, Dale had an almond Hershey bar that had melted and been sat on repeatedly, and Lawrence had a Pez dispenser with some of the candies left. They ate their lunch with gusto and then lay staring at the tiny fragments of sunlight and sky visible through the almost solid roof of branches.

They were discussing leaving to set up a clod ambush near the quarry when Mike suddenly said, "Shhh!" He pointed uphill.

Dale lay on his stomach and put his face against the stalks of the shrubs, trying to find one of the few angles that would give him a view of the trail.

There were boots out there. A man's boots, brown and large. For a second Dale thought that the guy was wearing muddy bandages and then he realized that those were the leggings that Duane had said soldiers used to wear. What had Duane called those things? Puttees. There was some guy standing six feet from Camp Three, wearing clunky boots and puttees. Dale could just see a hint of brown wool pantleg blousing out above the bandagelike wrappings.

"What ..." whispered Lawrence, straining to see.

Dale turned and put his hand over his brother's mouth. Lawrence struggled free and punched him, but stayed silent for a change.

When Dale looked back the boots were gone. Mike tapped him on the shoulder and jerked his head toward the east wall of the circle.

Footsteps crunched leaves and twigs right outside the secret entrance.

Duane was finding out more about the Borgias than he really wanted to know.

He was skimming and speed-reading in the way he often did when trying to cram an inordinate amount of information into his brain in the shortest possible time. It was a strange sensation; Duane compared it to the effect when one of his home-built crystal radio sets was poorly tuned, pulling in several stations at once. This kind of speed-learning tired Duane out and made him a bit dizzy, but he had little choice. Uncle Art wasn't going to spend all day here in the library.

The first thing Duane learned was that almost everything he knew about the Borgias from "common knowledge" was wrong or badly distorted. He paused a minute, chewing on the stem of his glasses and looking at nothing, recognizing that this initial fact of the unreliability of general knowledge had been consistent with most of the serious learning he'd done on his own over the past few years. Nothing was as simple as stupid people assumed it to be. Duane wondered if this was a basic law of the universe. If so, it made him tired to think of all the years ahead of him trying to unlearn before he could begin learning. He looked around at the basement stacks, thousands of books upon thousands of books, and felt dispirited that he would never read even all these books . . . never encounter all the conflicting opinions, facts, and viewpoints just in this basement. . . . much less everything in the libraries of Princeton, Yale, Harvard, and all the other schools he wanted to visit and absorb.