A long day’s tramp brought him fair sport, several partridges, two quail, but no sight of larger game. Hugh was a good shot and did not often fail to bring down his quarry.
“I wish I could get a deer,” he thought, but knew that for that he must go out at night.
The air was so still and the woods so silent that it seemed he must be the only person within a hundred miles. There was a sleepy swaying of the branches above his head and a quiet rustle of the leaves under his feet, otherwise there was scarcely a sound. Surely in this peaceful region there could be no such thing as quarreling and bloodshed. It was hard to believe that, only a few miles away, the dingy cabin clung to the slope of Jasper Peak and within it Half-Breed Jake and his Indian comrades were planning any sort of violence that would lead to the ruin of Oscar’s cherished scheme.
“It must be a mistake,” Hugh reflected almost aloud. “I believe I dreamed it. I don’t think this adventure is real.”
He had crossed a little brook, in the late afternoon, and was climbing the long slope beyond it when he realized that he was thirsty and that the route he was about to follow lay along the ridge, high above any water for many miles.
“I am not much of a woodsman,” he told himself. “I should have remembered to drink when I could. It would be better to go back.”
Quickly he ran down the hill, making a good deal of noise as he crashed through the underbrush. He stooped long to drink at the edge of the pool and then stood up to continue his journey. He glanced across at his own trail coming down to the water’s edge on the other shore, stared at it a moment, then ran splashing through the stream to look again. Close beside his own footprints and fresher even than they, were the marks of moccasined feet, as plain as those footprints of the big dog, Nicholas, that he had seen once, as plain and much more ominous. Some person had been following him through the wood, tracking him so closely and eagerly that he had not taken the pains to cover his own trail.
Hugh stood still and looked and listened with every nerve tense, but there was nothing to be seen, nothing to be heard. The forest was as silent as a forest in a dream. He crossed the brook again, and climbed the hill hastily. More than once he turned his head quickly and looked back over his shoulder, but there was never a stirring leaf nor a snapping twig to prove that he was being followed. He made his way homeward in the straightest line possible, thinking deeply all the way.
Time passed, the weather grew colder and the daylight shorter, but still the pirates made no move. Only the blue haze of their smoke going up from Jasper Peak showed that they were still there, watching and ever watching. Game began to be scarce in the restricted limit the boys allowed themselves for hunting, so that they fell to dipping deeper and deeper into Oscar’s stores. Everything was kept in the small shed backing up against the cottage with its door opening into the main room. This place was carefully inspected every day, according to instructions.
“For,” Oscar had said, “if the fieldmice get in and chew up your bacon or a leak comes in the roof and spoils your flour and meal, where are you? In case of bad weather your lives might depend on these supplies being safe.”