“Mr. Lord,” said Harry, “if I were working for you in your office and you wanted me to do something, you wouldn’t ask me what would happen if I failed to do it. You would expect me not to fail.”
Mr. Lord gave the boy a quick, approving glance but said nothing, only fell to examining the map.
“Well,” said he, “let’s see how you mean to do.”
“I mean to explore this tract, not every inch of it, of course, but by signals, and so forth. I figure that we’ll find some trace of them along the roads or in the wood trails. Also we can see a good deal of country from these mountains, some of them especially.”
“Suppose you tramped away up a mountain for a grandstand view and found it covered with dense woods?”
“I could climb a tree, but even that won’t be necessary. Do you know how they made this map, Mr. Lord? They had men out surveying the country. On the tops of some of these mountains there must be some old disused government survey stations. Here’s a mountain called Bald Knob, so we know right off there are no woods on it. Here’s Owl Pate—no woods on Owl Pate, I guess. Now this is what I mean to do, sir. I’m going right up that road from Ticonderoga, and if there hasn’t been any rain I can pick out their tracks if they went that way. That’s a stretch of flat country. If we haven’t spotted them by the time we get to Dibble Mountain, we’ll go up and take a look and see what we see. We may send up a Morse smoke signal and like enough that’ll fetch them. If it doesn’t, then on for Crown Point. You see, there’s the village, and no harm can come to us.”
“You could wire me from Crown Point,” suggested Mr. Lord.
“Yes, only we wouldn’t.”
Mr. Lord laughed. “See, there’s a good high mountain, Harry; Bulwagga, is it? Yes, Bulwagga.” He was getting quite into the spirit of the thing, and Harry led him along with the lead pencil, which Mr. Lord’s eyes followed as a needle follows a magnet. “Well, I hope you’ll find them,” he concluded. “I guess you’re equal to it. I wish I were young enough to go along.”
Harry rolled up his map and went up to Gordon’s room. He found that young gentleman in a rather despondent mood.