“My old hay farm? You don’t say! Then you’ve been at father’s farm. Bet they were glad to see you. Did they tell you I was up this way?”
Tom stared bewildered.
“No, there wasn’t anybody there. The place was burned out. I thought you’d all abandoned it. But never mind that. Dave, I’ve found the lost walnut raft.”
“You’re joking!” his cousin ejaculated.
“Not a bit of it. I saw the timber. It’s ashore now—part of it anyway. It’s on your land, and you’ve got to come back to claim it.”
And Tom briefly summarized the story of his adventures.
“Gracious, what luck!” Dave exclaimed. “I’d looked, off and on, all around that lake for signs of the old raft, but I never thought of poking into that swamp at the narrows. But you’re all wrong, Tom. That isn’t my land. I didn’t even have the land where I put up the old barn. It was just a hay-making place. I homesteaded a hundred acres back where you saw the burned shack, but when the shack burned I let it go.”
“But wasn’t that Uncle Phil’s place?” stammered Tom.
“I should say not!” Dave laughed. “Was that what you thought? You must have thought we were a pretty shiftless lot. I guess your guides didn’t know where we really lived. Our ranch is west of the river. You leave it before you come to the lake. There’s a trail cut, that you ought to have seen. We’ve got a good farm there, sixty acres planted, house, barns, live stock, and all the rest. It’s about twelve miles from my old shack.”
“You don’t mean to say Uncle Phil was living only twelve miles from me all the time?” cried Tom. “Why, at Oakley they said they hadn’t seen any of you all winter.”