“Must be ’bout thirty mile. I dunno how to get there—’less you had a canoe. You go right up the river to the Coboconk lakes,” said the postmaster.
“Me and my pardner’s plannin’ to go up past there,” said the man who knew the place. “Guess we could fix it to go to-morrow. We could take you up, if you know how to ride in a canoe without fallin’ out.”
“I’ve paddled a canoe a good many hundred miles,” said Tom indignantly. “I’d be glad to go if you can take me. How much’ll you charge me for the trip?”
The frontiersman glanced sidewise at the boy, and spat against the hot stove.
“Run you up for ten dollars.”
Tom knew well that this was outrageous. If he had been a dweller in that neighborhood he would have been welcome to go for nothing, for the sake of an extra hand at the paddles. And about twenty dollars was all he owned.
“Can’t afford to pay more than five,” he said firmly.
“Oh, well; make it five,” said the other, a little shamefacedly. “We’ll start early—six o’clock, say. You stoppin’ at the hotel?”
Tom had no other place to stop, though he could ill spare the additional dollar or two. He went back and engaged a room, and tried to amuse himself for the rest of the afternoon by looking over the straggling little backwoods village and its environs. He had seen others exactly like it, but he had never before been so close as this to Uncle Phil’s homestead, though he had been many times invited to visit it.
Tom’s home was in Toronto, where his father was in the wholesale lumber business. But there had been a frequent inter-change of letters between the city and the north woods; Uncle Phil always sent down a deer in November, and twice the boys, Dave and Ed, had paid a visit to Toronto. They were three and five years older than Tom, but the cousins had become great friends, and the tales Tom heard of backwoods adventure made him regard it as a sort of ideal life.