The Auto Boys' Quest

by James A. Braden

With a great deal more haste than ceremony, the roadside repast being finished, dishes and food were packed away again and the automobile sent once more bounding forward. Nearly fifty miles onward lay the little town of Sagersgrove and here the Auto Boys expected to receive information direct from Lannington concerning the movements of Gaines, Pickton and Perth.

How much or how little those young gentlemen may have discovered by this time, and what their intentions might be, were matters of marked interest to the chums who had so cleverly outwitted them. They were more than pleased with themselves, therefore, that their foresight had prompted the making of arrangements with Mr. Knight to send a telegram to Sagersgrove to be received upon reaching there.

That Knight & Wilder shared the secret of the four boys it is almost needless to say. Even to knowledge of the destination and the real purpose of the journey the garage proprietors had been taken into confidence. They were good, reliable friends, to begin with, and as the location of the Ship woods was remote from sources of automobile supplies, it might be necessary to send to them for repairs. And as both men had shown a lively interest in the enterprise now under way, it was quite certain Mr. Knight would not fail to have news of some kind awaiting the travelers at the point agreed upon.

Meanwhile the probable and possible discoveries of the Chosen Three and what their ultimate plans would be were discussed over and over again. Even if Gaines and his followers should learn the direction the Thirty had taken—even if they chanced upon the discovery that the party had spent the night in Littleton—they would still be unable to so much as guess the direction taken next.

Again, even if the Trio had any knowledge of the great Ship forest they would have no reason for supposing the four friends to be bent on reaching that wilderness. All the information the Gaines crowd had, so far as known, and the thing which so seriously pricked their curiosity, was that sentence they had somehow overheard, "Three stones piled one on top of another to mark the place."

"They could connect that and the big woods if they knew where we were heading for; but by itself the talk of the three stones gives them nothing to go by," urged Billy Worth. He had put the same thought into slightly different words at least a half-dozen times before and the others had done no less. But there was no cause to doubt his reasoning.

"Three stones piled one on top of another" might be used to mark many and many different sorts of places. They might be in town. They might be in the country, in pasture or meadow; beside a lake in the valley, or on the summit of the hills. Again, what reason why they might not be in the heart of a great forest?

The Ship woods comprised such a forest. Its very name was derived from the fact that for long years great timbers for ship building purposes had been cut there. In one part or another of its vast expanse men were at work the whole year through, sawing, chopping, hewing. A single "stick" from the forest's depths might measure more than one hundred feet in length by three feet or more each way, in thickness. Perhaps four teams of horses would be used to haul such a piece of timber out of the woods and to the railroad siding where it was loaded for transportation to the owners' mills, many miles away.

The fact that those who owned the forest did live a long distance from it, naturally left the vast tract in the hands of only such men as were employed in cutting the big "sticks." And as the latter were little interested in anything more than the trees that would do for their purposes, the woods was for the most part regarded as pretty nearly public property. That is to say, no one so much as thought of asking permission to go there, to camp, to hunt, to pick blackberries, or anything of the kind.

Nor was anyone expected to do so, for that matter. The boss timber man and the crews which handled the saws, and axes, the heavy chains, the canthooks and all the paraphernalia of their hard, hard work, asked no questions of trespassers. They warned hunters against leaving campfires burning and against dropping lighted matches in the leaves. They would permit no one to chop into or otherwise injure a tree which might make "timber" then or later; but in general the occasional stranger who visited these wilds was as free to come to hunt, to fish, to build a brush shack or camp, or to gather firewood, herbs or poles or bark—to do almost as he pleased in short—and as free to go away again, as he would have been in the unclaimed forest of a new country.