"That is what I thought. Well, they have a good one now, and what's more, they must like him, for Daily said Matt was a fine fellow; or something like that," soliloquized Joe. He did not utter the words aloud, for he wasn't sure it would be prudent to tell Mr. Holmes that he and his two friends were better acquainted with Matt Coyle than anybody in the Glen's Falls country. If they could help it, the boys did not mean to tell who they were or where they came from, for fear that the information might reach Matt's ears in a roundabout way. He was glad when Roy said:
"Haven't we stayed here about long enough? If we want this to be our last night in the mountains we had better take to the road again."
"I guess you had," replied Mr. Holmes, reluctantly. "I never was guilty of so inhospitable an act before, except when I showed Daily's letter to the detective who was stopping with me and asked him what I had better do about it, and I would not be guilty of it now if I could do as I pleased. Remember my advice and go to bed in the dark; for if you don't I am afraid you will have visitors before morning."
The boys promised to bear the matter in mind, at the same time assuring the old man that it was no hardship for them to sleep out of doors, and Mr. Holmes hurried away to get the pitcher of milk and have a supper and breakfast put up for them. Being apprehensive that some of the Buster band might be on the watch, hoping to collect some damaging evidence against the farmer that would warrant them in burning his house, Joe Wayring and his friends did not once venture across the threshold, although often urged, but ate a lunch and drank their fill of milk while sitting on the back steps. When the boys offered to pay for being so royally entertained, Mr. Holmes would not listen to it. By putting it out of the power of those sheep-killing dogs to do any more mischief, they had done him and all the rest of the law-abiding men in the settlement a kindness, and he wished they could stay there for a week so that he and his neighbors might show them how grateful they were for it. If any citizen of that region had shot those dogs, he would have been homeless before another week had passed over his head.
"I hope that Matt will not think that a citizen did do it, and proceed to wreak vengeance upon some one against whom he happens to hold a grudge," said Roy, as they moved swiftly out of the gate and turned down the road. "I still think that if Mr. Holmes and a few determined men would wake up and go about it in earnest, they could put an end to this reign of terror. I can't see why they don't try it."
But there was one thing that Roy and his friends did not know, and Mr. Holmes had forgotten to speak of it. There was not a single building in Glen's Falls that had a dollar's worth of insurance upon it. The risks had all been canceled at the breaking out of the war of the Rebellion, and there had been none taken there since. This was one thing that made Mr. Holmes and his neighbors so very timid.
The town of Glen's Falls was a dreary looking spot, as the boys found when they came to ride through it. There was a forest of fine shade-trees on each side of the wide principal thoroughfare, but there was grass instead of walks under them, and the buildings behind were rapidly falling to pieces. The evidences of former prosperity that met their eyes on every hand proved that there had once been money and brains in the place, and that it would have amounted to something before this time if Dave Daily and the rest of the Buster band had been out of the way. They slaked their thirst at a pump on the corner of a cross-road and continued on their way without meeting a single person. If it had not been for an occasional head they saw through the windows of some of the houses they passed, they would have said that the town was deserted.
Their guide-book told them that the road that led from Glen's Falls through the mountains to the low country beyond was so plain it could not be missed, and perhaps it was when the man who wrote the book passed that way on his wheel; but it was not so now. Roads there were in abundance, and they all ran down hill in the direction the boys wanted to go; but they were filled with obstructions, and no particular one of them showed more signs of travel than another.
"I'd like to see the fellow who says he had a mile of the best of coasting along this road try his hand at it now," said Roy, seating himself on a log and cooling his flushed face with his cap while he waited for one or the other of his friends to go ahead and take the lead. "I'm tired out, and if I was sure it would be quite safe to do so, I should be in favor of going into camp."
"I don't believe he ever came along this road," said Joe. "We've got a little out of our reckoning, that's all."