“Don’t believe as I know ’em,” returned the pioneer, looking Tom over with acute curiosity. “Was you expectin’ to see ’em?”
“Yes, I wrote them to meet me here, but I don’t see any of them.”
“Well, the town ain’t very big. You can’t miss ’em if they’re here,” the other said, encouragingly.
This had already struck Tom’s mind. The straggling, muddy street of log houses, frame shacks, three or four stores was barely a hundred yards long, and then the vast northern Canadian forest closed in again. Away at the end of the village he had a glimpse of a good-sized river, yellow and swollen with melting snow. There were stray drifts of snow and patches of ice still lingering in sheltered places everywhere, rather to Tom’s surprise, for spring had seemed well advanced when he left Toronto; and despite the sunshine the air was full of a raw harshness, charged with a smell of pine and snow.
He carried his baggage into the hotel and left it there, glancing into the bar and sitting-room. Emerging again, he found the knot of idlers had scattered, and the horses were being unharnessed from the stage. He walked down the board sidewalk as far as it went, scrutinizing every face, looking into the stores, with anxiety growing upon him. Oakley was his uncle’s post-office, but his homestead was some thirty miles back in the woods, and Tom had no idea in which direction nor how to get there.
All at once it occurred to him that they must know at the post-office. That was the place for information. He had passed it already; he had seen the sign, and he turned more hopefully back. The post-office was a general store as well. It was full of a mixed smell of leather and molasses and tobacco, and there was a group of fur-capped settlers smoking and talking beside the big stove. Among them Tom recognized the man he had already spoken with, and they all stopped talking and looked at the boy with great interest. Tom felt that they instantly recognized him as from the city, though he had taken pains to wear his roughest and heaviest clothes, a flannel shirt and high shoepacks which he had used in the woods before; but his hands and face were suspiciously untanned.
The postmaster, a spectacled elderly man, was behind a wire compartment at the rear of the store, and had just finished sorting the mail brought in by the stage when Tom approached him.
“Why, no,” he answered. “I ain’t see Phil Jackson to-day. Fact is, I don’t believe I’ve set eyes on him all winter. Seems to me I heard he’d gone away—him and the boys.”
It was indeed six or eight months since Tom had heard from any of his uncle’s family, but he had never dreamed that they could have left the north Canadian ranch where they had been for five years, and where they were doing prosperously.
“No, Jackson ain’t gone away,” put in one of the men by the stove. “Mebbe he don’t come in to Oakley no more, but he’s still on his homestead.”