In the course of the day Mr. Betterson and Rufe visited the supposed scene of Rad's disaster, and there met by chance Jack and his friend Forrest Felton, who for a similar object had driven up from North Mills.
The river had gone down almost as rapidly as it had risen, and fording it now by daylight was no such difficult matter. But there still were the timbers and tree-tops amidst which the vehicles had passed the night before.
Jack showed marks on one of his wheels where the spokes had been sharply raked, and told how, examining Snowfoot by daylight, he had found muddy splashes on his flank, as if he had been struck there by a bough or branch drenched in turbid water.
"I think," said he, "that as Rad was getting the buggy clear, the limb of a tree turned over and hit the horse. That started him, and away he went. I don't believe Rad is drowned."
Search was made among the rubbish at the bridge, and for some distance down the river; but no traces of Rad were discovered.
"Maybe he has gone home by water," was Rufe's rather too playful way of saying that the drowned body might have floated down stream.
"If he got out alive," said Jack's friend Felton, "he must have found his way to some house near by, in quest of pantaloons." And the party now proceeded to make inquiries at the scattered huts of the Dutch—or rather German—settlers along the edge of the timber.
At the first two doors where they stopped they found only women and children, who could speak no English. But at the next house they saw a girl, who eagerly answered "Yah! yah!" to their questions, and ran and called a man working at the back door.
He was a short, thick-set man, with a big russet beard and serious blue eyes.
"Goot morgin," he said, coming to the road to greet the strangers. "Der been some vind dis vay,—you see some?—vas las' ebening."