He turned to the north, and followed the line as nearly as might be. The Darrell tract was entirely wooded, and when he reached the uplands he kept on in the shadowy aisles of the sap-pines which covered his neighbor's property.
He came finally to where the ground fell away again, and the yellow, deeply-rutted road lay at his feet. The winter had played havoc with the automobile track.
The highway was unfenced and the bank dropped fifteen feet to the beaten path. A leaning oak overhung the road and Hiram lingered here, lying on its broad trunk, face upward, with his hat pulled over his eyes to shield them from the sunlight which filtered through the branches.
This land hereabout was beautiful. The boy could appreciate the beauty as well as the utility of the soil. It was so pleasing to the eye that he wished with all his heart it had been his own land he had surveyed.
“And I'll not be a tenant farmer all my life, nor a farm-foreman, as father was,” determined the boy. “I'll get ahead. If I work for the benefit of other people for a few years, surely I'll win the chance in time to at last work for myself.”
In the midst of his ruminations a sound broke upon his ear—a jarring note in the peaceful murmur of the woodland life. It was the thud of a horse's hoofs.
Not the sedate tunk-tunk of iron-shod feet on the damp earth, but an erratic and rapid pounding of hoof-beats which came on with such startling swiftness that Hiram sat up instantly, and craned his neck to see up the road.
“That horse is running away!” gasped the young farmer, and he swung himself out upon the lowest branch of the leaning tree which overhung the carttrack, the better to see along the highway.