“Which way are you going, Daddy?” asked Bert, as he and his sister took their seats again.
“I don’t know that it makes much difference,” Mr. Bobbsey replied. “But I think I’ll travel back and see if we can get on the road we first took. This big rock doesn’t seem to be the right one. We must have turned off the road on which we were traveling, some distance back.”
On they chugged through the forest, but it was with lighter hearts now—hearts that were lightened by the smiling sun even as the dark woods were made less gloomy. They would certainly get out of the forest soon, they felt.
However, look about him as Mr. Bobbsey did, he could not tell where the main road was—at least, the road by which he had entered the forest in search of the strange woman.
He saw several wood roads leading off the one which he had traveled, and he tried to tell, by looking at the marks of automobile wheels, which was the way they had originally taken. But other cars had also gone over the same road, so the marks of the wheels of the Bobbsey car could not be picked out.
The twins’ father was about to decide to turn about and go the other way when suddenly, from just ahead of them, came a voice, shouting:
“Whoa there! Where you tryin’ to go? You’ve been out all night, an’ now you want to run away ag’in! Whoa, I tell you!”
“Sounds like somebody talking to a horse,” observed Bert.
“Maybe it was the horse that tried to get into our auto,” suggested Nan.
Then, around a bend in the road, came a lanky farmer boy, of not more than fourteen, leading a horse. Whether it was the same animal that had frightened Nan and Bert could not be said for certain at once, though, later, they learned that it was.