"If the child has walked it," rejoined Elster, "so may the mother; and if he has not, and is lost to us forever, then this lonely house is our home no longer! I return to it no more."
Though of a gentle and yielding nature under ordinary circumstances, Elster could meet a great trial, like the present one, with a spirit firm and courageous enough; and knowing this, her husband forbore any further remonstrance to her determination. The sun had set and the moon was rising, when, having made their solitary dwelling as secure as possible, they set out on their melancholy journey. In those days the buffalo traces, as they were called, formed the only highways of the wilderness, and the one our poor friends were now following led, for the greater part of the way, through a dense and tangled forest, where the moonlight showed itself only in straggling beams and shed but a ghostly glimmer. At intervals the sombre wildness of the scene would be relieved by a bluegrass glade, all agleam with moonbeams and glistering dew drops, saving where flecked with the shadows of clumped or scattered trees. Pleasing, however, as was the contrast they presented to the savage solitudes around them, these bright spots left upon the spirit an impression of sadness quite peculiar. Each had so much the appearance of a well kept park or woodland pasture that the lonely wayfarers would sometimes find themselves all but expecting that the next turn of the road would bring them in sight of the stately mansion or comfortable farmhouse to which these beautiful grounds pertained. Nothing of the kind appearing there, the spot, from the very suggestiveness of the homelike, would seem to them more desolate than the most unhomelike parts of the forest.
Often would they pause and call out loudly the name of their boy; the bare possibility that he might be near and hear them seemed too precious to be slighted. Saving this, and, from time to time, an inquiry of affectionate solicitude on the part of the husband, with the wife's answer of patient reassurance that she was not weary, the two poor hearts pursued their way in silence. In the course of every four or five miles they would come to a solitary cabin home like their own, where they would stop and rouse the sleeping inmates, to inquire if aught had been seen there of their boy. Twice or thrice they heard, a far way off in the darkness, sounds that came to their troubled ears like the cries of a child in distress or terror. But when they had paused to listen, and had sent the name of their loved one ringing far and wide, naught had heard they, but the screaming of a night bird wheeling high aloft, or, peradventure, the distant howling of a wolf abroad on his nightly foray. At such times, with a look of dumb, distressed perplexity, first up into their faces, then all around him, old Pow-wow would give a plaintive whine, as if fully conscious that all was not going well with his human friends, and that this unwonted journey had a sad reference, in some way, to his little master. Sometimes dropping down upon his haunches in the path, some distance in advance, and turning his muzzle pitifully up to the moon, the affectionate old fellow would howl outright, long and loud, nor leaving off until his master and mistress were well up with him again. Thus, in his poor, dumb way, would Pow-wow testify that he was their fellow-sufferer, grieving and sympathizing with them and longing so earnestly to do something to help and comfort them—only but show poor dog how he might set about it.
CHAPTER XVIII.
Pow-Wow Finds Him.
The gray dawn was beginning to take the sun-red glow of morning, when, quite worn out with so long a walk, the anxious parents arrived at the stockade station—the center and rallying point of the settlements in that quarter of Kentucky. They had been indulging themselves in the forlorn hope that their boy, by some strange chance, might possibly have found his way to that place; but this vanished with the first look of wondering-inquiry that greeted their coming. Though no tongue could give them any tidings of the lost one, kind and sympathetic hearts were there for comfort, with willing hands and swift feet for help. Among the latter were several hunters, cunning in woodcraft, who could follow a trail, whether of man or beast, the livelong day; and over ground where nothing might be distinguished by the inexperienced eye but grass or leaves, sand, pebbles or solid rock.
Forth on the humane errand they sped them, one and all, some to the northward, some to the southward; many to the eastward, but none to the westward. The little runaway's starting point had been in the East; he might have strayed away toward the North or toward the South, but it seemed hardly possible that he could have passed on by toward the West. They little imagined how far the wayward young feet had followed the setting sun!
All day long they beat the tangled wilds. Of savage beasts, traces, more than enough, could they find, turn whither they might; and of savage men, two or three recent trails, one of them leading directly across the buffalo highway that traversed the forest between the settlements and Whitney's distant cabin. Late in the afternoon the questers began returning to the fort, dropping in, weary and disheartened, one after one. Some had pushed the search to the very threshold of the deserted home, and had observed how the boy's footprints, after tracing themselves along the path down the hillside, suddenly vanished, there at the spring, and never a sign anear the spot of living things besides, which could suggest an explanation of the mystery. What manner of disappearance might this be?