“He didn’t wade,” says Mark, “b-because he don’t know this river. It l-looks like it might be deep out there, and the current’s swift. He wouldn’t tackle it.”
“I guess not,” says I, “but which way did he go?”
“That,” says Mark, “is what we got to f-find out. Maybe he didn’t come right down to the river at all, but I think he did.”
“Why?” says I.
“To see if he couldn’t get across. He’d f-feel safer with a river between him and Jethro. But he didn’t cross here. It looks dangerous. Either he went up or down, and I think close to the water, searchin’ for a place to cross.”
“It’s perty soft along here for quite a ways,” says I. “Maybe we can find footprints.”
“You go up,” says Mark, “and I’ll go down. Holler if you f-f-find any thin’.”
I went off like he said, pretending I was an Indian. Maybe a couple of hunderd feet upstream I came on a place where somebody had walked right down to the edge of the river, because there in the mud were tracks filled with water. The place was tramped up quite a bit, and there were tracks leading back away from the river toward the bluff and the trees.
I yelled at Mark and he turned and came.
We followed the tracks part way up the bluff and then they turned up-stream, going along among the trees. Then, all of a sudden, they went up the bank again and turned right back down-stream the way they’d come from, and then they went higher till they came to a rail fence right along the edge of the bluff and among the trees. From that minute we couldn’t find another track.