CHAPTER IX.
MEETING AN OLD FRIEND.
IT was a half hour’s climb to the top of the ridge, it being so precipitous in places that even a lusty youth like Harvey Hamilton had to pause more than once to rest his limbs and regain his wind. He accomplished his task in due time and reaching the crest, uttered an exclamation of amazement at the wonderful beauty of the landscape spread before him.
He had crossed the boundary of the county and was in Essex, which includes nearly all of the romantic Adirondack region, familiar to the thousands who visit it every year. As far as the vision could travel were wooded mountain peaks, craggy spurs, lakes, some of considerable size, the headwaters of the Hudson and other rivers, waterfalls, dashing streams, the country dotted here and there with straggling hamlets, a fashionable hotel or two, scattered cabins and rude dwellings, while tiny columns of smoke climbing through the treetops told where parties had their camps and were living in the open, with the sensible resolve to get all that the forest, redolent with spruce and balsam, could give them.
With the aid of his glass, Harvey identified a canoe containing a man and woman, the latter paddling up the winding stream far to the left, while on the shore of the lake, to the right, gleamed the white tent of some campers. He even recognized the tiny figures moving about, and saw a man enter a canoe and hurry out upon the sheet of water, which gleamed like a vast mirror of silver.
The view was worth traveling thousands of miles to enjoy. In all his wanderings through Switzerland, the Tyrol, and Italy, Harvey had beheld nothing like it. While those parts of the Old World far surpass the Adirondacks in magnificence and grandeur, there was a certain witching charm in this place not easily describable that enthralled the young American and held him mute under a spell that no European scene had been able to weave about him.
While in other circumstances he could have stood or sat for hours drinking in the fascinating beauty, he could not keep his thoughts from the serious task upon which he had entered days before. Bohunkus Johnson, if alive, was in peril from the demented man who held him a prisoner, and his rescue must be accomplished without waste of time.
Somewhere in that unrivaled landscape, Professor Morgan had gone with his monoplane. Possibly he had crossed the limit of the searcher’s vision, but the latter did not think it likely. At any rate he determined to examine the territory at his feet before entering new fields.
The prosaic truth forced itself upon Harvey Hamilton that his most pressing need just then was food. He was sure he never felt quite so hungry, and there was no call for him to suffer so long as he was in a land of plenty, where hospitality is the law.
His first intention was to go down the slope to the lake, on whose bank the tent stood. He knew he would be welcome and be given abundantly of what he needed. But the spot was two miles off at least, and somehow he disliked meeting a party of jovial campers, as they were likely to be. He was not in the mood for jest and quip and feared that the contact would not help him in his self-appointed task.
In the opposite direction from the lake, nestling in a small clearing, was a cabin similar to those which he had seen during his adventurous days in eastern Pennsylvania. It was not more than a third as far from where he stood as the camp. While he observed no one moving about, a tiny spiral of smoke climbing from the stone chimney showed that the dwelling had occupants. He decided to go thither.