“A straight course, almost due northeast from here, and we’ll hit it,” he decided, folding the rulers and putting them carefully away. Then he methodically replaced the map in its envelope.
A few minutes later they set out on the course Sam had outlined. He planned to travel across country, the sure-footed burro being as much at home on the rough mountainside as on a trail.
“Lay hold of the ropes at the side of the pack if you get tired,” he advised the boys. “You’ll find it helps a lot.”
After an hour’s traveling, of a sort to which they had never been accustomed, the boys were glad to accept this advice, and found themselves greatly aided.
Their way lay over bowlder-strewn ground, under towering columnar trunks of great trees of the pine tribe. The lofty conifers entwined their dark branches high in the air, making the forest floor beneath cool and dim.
It was noon when Sam Hartley, consulting map and compass once more, struck off to the east.
“We ought to be there in ten minutes,” he said, without a trace of hesitation in his tone. A sea captain could not have been more confident of bringing his vessel across the ocean into a designated port than Sam was of landing in the exact spot for which he had laid his calculations.
As a matter of fact, it was half an hour before they emerged from the pine woods into a clearing littered with stumps and blackened trunks. Before them was a half-grown corn field, and traces of cultivation were all about them. In a roughly fenced pasture lot—cleared like the rest from the virgin forest—were some cattle and horses.
Across the corn field could be seen a long, low house of logs, with a rough-shingled roof. A little distance from it were some barns painted a dull red and made of undressed lumber, and a big corral with a hay stack in the center of it.
As they struck out, skirting the edge of the corn field, toward the house, the death-like quiet that had reigned about it was ruefully broken. From behind one of the barns there suddenly emerged a blue-bloused figure from whose head a pigtail stuck out behind as it flew along. Hardly had the new arrivals taken in this, before, behind the Chinaman, came a second figure, that of a woman in a blue sun bonnet and a pink print dress. They could see that she had a rifle in her hands, and as they watched she raised it and fired after the retreating Chinaman.