All fellow-sojourners in the wilderness awaken keen interest, and the unbroken silence and solitude of a boundless forest make a fellow human being one we are glad to accost.
A party of lumbermen wielding axes causes one to turn aside and call on them. A sportsman’s camp seen on a lake shore or near a stream’s bank always invites a landing to interview whoever may be there.
All this interest was now felt by Old Cy and Ray, and with it an added sense of danger. No friendly hunter or trapper would thus ignore them in the woods. This piratically minded thief must have seen them, for the spruce-clad oval, perhaps half a mile in width, was comparatively free from undergrowth where they had been working. He had crossed it within fairly open sight of them, had found the otter hanging from a limb, had taken it, and thence on to rob their canoe, daub it with that hideous emblem, world-wide in meaning, and then had gone on his way. Almost could Old Cy see him watching them from behind trees, skulking along when their backs were turned, a low, contemptible thief.
Old Cy knew that bordering this oval ridge on its farther side was a swamp, that a stream flowed through it, and surmising that this fellow might have come up or down this stream, he left their cabin prepared for a two or three days’ sojourn away from it, which meant that food, blankets, and simple cooking utensils must be taken along.
No halt was made to visit traps. Old Cy was trailing bigger game now; and when the point where they had left the canoe the day previous was reached, the canoe was pulled out on the stream’s bank, the rifles only taken, and the trailing began. He followed up the brook valley a little way, to find that only one track came down; he then circled about the canoe, until, like a hound, he found where the clearly defined trail left the swamp again.
Here in the soft carpet under the spruce trees one could follow this trail on the run, and here also Old Cy found where this enemy had halted beside trees evidently while watching them, as the tracks indicated. When the bordering swamp was reached, the trail turned in a westerly direction, skirting thus for half a mile, and here, also, evidences of skulking along were visible.
Another trail was now come upon, but leading directly over the ridge, and just beyond this juncture both the trails now joined, entered the swamp, and ended at a lagoon opening out from the stream. Here, also, evidences of a canoe having been hauled up into the bog were visible.
“That sneakin’ pirate come up this stream,” Old Cy observed to Ray, as the two stood looking at these unmistakable signs. “He left his canoe here ’n’ crossed the ridge above us ’n’ down to whar we left the otter ’n’ on to our canoe. Then he come back the way we follered, ’n’ my idee is he had his eye on us most o’ the time. I callate he has been laughin’ ever since at what we’d say when we found that mud daub on our canoe, durn him!”
But their canoe was now a half-mile away, and for a little time Old Cy looked at the black, currentless stream and considered. Then he glanced up at the sun.
“I’ve a notion we’d best fetch our canoe over here,” he said at last, “an’ follow this thief a spell farther. We may come on to suthin’.”