He answered Shultz, and presently Charley came hobbling and panting through the darkness.
“Did you catch him?” was his first question.
“No, he got away; but he’s somewhere in these woods, and, knowing that much, we may be able to find him yet. If we could only take him safely back to Oakdale, it might seem to square up a little for what we’ve done.”
“I was afraid you’d leave me,” Shultz almost whimpered. “I was afraid to be left alone again. Don’t do it, Ned—please don’t. If you hear him or see him, don’t run away from me.”
Only yesterday Osgood could never have dreamed it possible for anything so completely to break the nerve of his companion. There was little left of the old stubborn, defiant, bulldozing Shultz; in his abject terror of being left alone, he was more like a timid child.
“We ought to get searchers, a whole lot of them, and bring them here,” said Ned. “That would be the right thing to do.”
“But if we could only find him ourselves without other aid,” argued Charley, “it would give us a better show with the people who’ll be ready enough to jump on us when they know the truth. We might find him, you know. He can’t be far away. Which way was he going the last you knew?”
“Toward the lake, I think, but he kept dodging about, so that there is no real certainty of it. Probably he hasn’t any objective point in his mind. He just ran in any direction that happened to be the easiest.”
“The ground slopes toward the lake,” reasoned Shultz. “He’ll keep on going that way.”
“There may be some logic in that, and there’s a bare chance that we may come upon him again. Let’s make as little noise as possible. We don’t want him to be warned or frightened by hearing us a long distance away.”