"I know it as well as if I had been at his side when he did it," replied Bob, positively. "And, Tom, if Silas and his friend have shot somebody— Great Scott! If I ever take a hand in any more jokes of that sort, I hope I shall be shot myself."
"Seems to me, that Tom and Bob don't take any too much interest in their business," thought the young game-warden, as he started down the mountain toward his cabin. "The gorge runs through Mr. Hallet's wood-lot, and if those boys are going to confine their scouting to the covers on the lower side of it, I don't see how they are going to protect the birds. Well, it shan't stop me. As soon as I get around to it, I am going to cut a path down one side and up the other, and after that I shall cross over every day to take a look at things."
Joe was hungry when he reached his cabin, and then he found that there was one thing that had been forgotten—a clock.
He had already laid out a regular routine of work—setting aside certain things that were to be done at certain hours of the day or evening; but how was he going to follow it without the aid of a timepiece?
A few minutes reflection showed him a way out of his quandary. Among the other relics of better days that were to be found in his father's cabin was an old-fashioned bull's-eye watch which had not seen the light of day for many a long year.
Joe wasn't sure that it would run, but it wouldn't cost him anything more than a two-hours' walk to find out, and he decided that he would go down and ask his mother for it as soon as he had eaten his dinner.
"I can't set my house to rights to-day anyhow," thought he, "because I have wasted too much time in looking for father and Dan; but I'll have it all in order to-morrow, unless some other law-breakers call me up the mountain, and the day after that, I'll begin on my routine, and stick to it as long as I am here."
If you had been there, reader, to take a look around Joe's cabin, you would have told yourself that there was another and still more important thing that had been forgotten—a cooking-stove.
But Joe didn't miss it, for never in his life had he seen a meal prepared over a stove. He would not have known how to use one if he had had it; but give him a bed of coals in a fire-place, or on the mountain-side, and he could get up as good a dinner as any hungry boy would care to have set before him.
He had everything in the way of pots, pans and kettles that he could possibly find use for, but on this particular day he did not call many of them into service—nothing, in fact, but the pot in which he made his tea, and the frying-pan in which he cooked two generous slices of bacon.