The shore on which the boys found themselves a few moments later was wild and rocky. There were great oaks towering along the side hills and immense trees of hickory, beech and walnut shut out the view on all sides. There was also a heavy undergrowth.
“Where are you heading for?” asked Case, as Alex turned into a thicket and went tramping through it with a great noise.
“I think,” Alex replied, “that we’d better keep off to the west and south. I looked at a map of the river just before I left the boat, and there’s a great bend here. We can walk across it in an hour or two, but it would take half a day to float or row around it.”
“I see,” Case answered. “There may be a town in a nook around the bend. That’s where they build towns in this country.”
The boys made good time for an hour or more, when they came out on the bank of the river perhaps three miles from the boat, across the bend, and ten or fifteen by way of the river. Just below them, hardly forty rods from the point where they emerged from the underbrush, they saw a little river settlement composed of half a dozen ramshackle houses, a fishing dock, and one store building.
“There!” Alex said. “I’ll bet we find spark plugs there!”
“If we find as many spark plugs there as we didn’t find squirrels coming through,” Case laughed, “It will take a long time to get our motor started.”
“Oh, well,” Alex answered, “we didn’t look very hard for squirrels, anyway. We’ll see what they’ve got here, and do our hunting on the way back.”
“Clay may get what we want from some of the boats,” Case suggested. “There are lots of boats on the river that ought to carry spark plugs. It’s dollars to apples that every motor boat we’ve seen to-day carries an extra supply.”
“That won’t do us any good,” Alex answered, “if they don’t show a disposition to pass them around.”