When the father and mother died the family broke up. The two boys, Buck and Hank, kept bachelor's hall at the ricketty old ruin of a house on the river until ejected by its owner for non-payment of rent, and then went to the bad generally.
They patched up an abandoned shack over on the bottoms, the postmaster at Millville told Bart, and lived by fishing, hunting and their depredations on orchards and chicken coops.
In one of their nightly forays about a year previous they were captured and fined heavily. They could not pay the fine and were sent to jail for six months.
About the first of June they were released, came back to Millville, found their old shack burned down, and since then, the postmaster understood, had camped out in the woods, giving the town a wide berth—in fact, only occasionally appearing, to buy a little flour, sugar or coffee, or, mostly, tobacco.
Nobody had seen them for over a week—nobody knew anything of a newly-painted red wagon.
It seemed probable, Bart theorized, that if they had made for hiding in any of their familiar woodland haunts, they had reached the same by driving through Millville before daylight, and when nobody was astir.
Bart finally found a woodcutter who knew where the Tollivers had had their camping place the week previous. He described the spot and Bart was soon there—a secluded gully about two miles from town.
The place showed evidences of having been used as a camp, but not recently, and Bart went on a general blind hunt.
He traversed the woods for miles, both sides of a dried up rivercourse, and inquired at farmhouses and of occasional pedestrians he met.
It was all of no avail. At three o'clock in the afternoon, tired, bramble-torn and a little discouraged, he sat down by the roadside to rest and think. He began to censure himself for taking the independent course he had pursued.