“But do you think he suspected anything?”
“Ah, that’s another question! I hope not; but there’s no telling. I can tell you one thing, however. There isn’t room enough in the hills for George Edwards and our party, too, and one or the other must go.”
“I was thinking of that myself,” said Forbes. “He might discover something, you know, while he’s prowling around in search of his minks and coons. Couldn’t we drive him out by burning his shanty?”
“We might put him to some trouble, but we couldn’t drive him out in that way,” replied Wallace. “George is handy with an axe, and in two days’ time he could build another cabin, and perhaps he would be smart enough to keep watch of it. But I shall not draw an easy breath as long as he is up there. If he should happen to stumble upon our cache? Whew! We must think about this, boys, and decide upon something.”
Meanwhile, George Edwards was plodding along towards the lake, and while he walked he pondered deeply. The incidents of the last half hour perplexed and astonished him. What was the meaning of Benson’s unwarrantable excitement? and what was it that had caused the alarm so plainly visible on the faces of the three hunters when they first became aware of his approach?
“Benson never took me for a tramp,” said George to himself. “That story was a fraud on the face of it. And, then, what business had they to be talking about old man Stebbins, and the money he is supposed to have in his house? It is a wonder to me that he hasn’t been robbed a dozen times.”
There were one or two other points in the conversation he had overheard that came into the boy’s mind, but to which he did not then attach any importance. He did not think of them again until some days had passed away, and then they were recalled to his recollection in a most unexpected manner.
It was fifteen miles from George’s old home to his home in the woods, and, as the road that led to it (if the blind path he followed could be called a road) ran up hill nearly all the way, it took him a long time to cover the distance—much longer than it usually did, for he was encumbered by his heavy bundle.
The sun was sinking behind the trees when he came out of the bushes and stopped to rest for a moment on a little promontory that jutted out into the deep-blue bosom of Lone Lake—a beautiful sheet of water, nine miles long and half as wide, and situated twenty-five hundred feet above the level of the sea—at least, that was what the young surveyors at the Montford Academy said.
George gazed upon its mirror-like surface as one gazes upon the face of a friend from whom he has long been separated. It had yielded him and his mother a support and kept a roof over their heads for two long years, and it was his main dependence now.