“Better let me scout ahead, Father!” Tom urged. “We can’t tell what Harrison may be doing. He might raft down the timber in small quantities as fast as he got it out, and sell it at Oakley.”
“That’s a fact,” said Mr. Jackson, struck by this danger. “I suppose you could stop anything like that, if you took a man or two with you. I’d give you written authority.”
“But Uncle Phil’s ranch must be on the way,” cried Tom, struck with a fresh idea. “He’d go over with me, or Cousin Ed—maybe somebody else.”
This proposition was so evidently sound that Tom set out soon after breakfast. Plenty of people knew where Phil Jackson’s farm lay, and Tom regretted that he had not originally come to Ormond instead of Oakley. But then he would probably never have reached Coboconk and the lost raft.
He carried only his rifle and a package of cold lunch, expecting to reach the farm some time that afternoon. It was supposed to be only fifteen miles, and there was a road,—not much used, indeed, but still a road,—which it would be easy to follow. Mr. Jackson was to collect his men and their outfit and come on the next day, to rejoin Tom where the trail struck the river, below Little Coboconk.
The old road proved rough traveling. Apparently it had not been used at all for a long time, and it was grown up thickly with small spruces and raspberry thickets—so jungly, in fact, that Tom often found it easier to take to the woods.
It was not going to be easy traveling for the wagons, he thought; and wondered if Harrison’s men had come in this way. Still, he plodded on and ate his lunch about noon, and within the next few miles he began to look for traces of settlement. Nothing appeared, however, and he began to travel slowly, looking about him more carefully for trails. An uneasy qualm began to assail him, but he kept on until, as the sun came down close to the tree-tops, he became assured that he had somehow missed the way.
He turned back at once on his own trail. Once he came to what seemed a cow track crossing the path, but it presently became untraceable. The sun was going down, and he stopped. By this time he was grown hardened to being lost in the woods; but he was hungry, and the prospect of a supperless night was not attractive.
It was warm, however, and he built a fire and made himself as comfortable as possible. Despite an empty stomach, he managed to sleep; and in the earliest morning, rested but famished, he started back on the road over which he had come. But it was only after an hour or so that he came upon an obscure-looking cross trail that he had previously overlooked. He might have passed it again, had not his attention been caught by something like the far-away bellow of a cow.
He followed up the trail toward the sound, and within a quarter of a mile he struck a wide, stumpy, pasture clearing. Beyond another belt of trees he emerged upon a plowed field, with a view of a large log house and barns, which he knew must be the elusive homestead of Uncle Phil.