We had a couple of scout belt-axes along, but no camping stuff, because we hadn’t thought that we’d stay up there very long.
Pretty soon we hit into the railroad tracks and followed them north. I guess the people who saw us thought we were crazy. Harry said Pee-wee looked like Don Quixote, with all that junk hanging from him.
Harry said, “It will be easy to find Brent’s sign and to follow his blazing in the woods, but how are we going to find out where the hold-up occurred? That’s the question.”
“We’re going to hunt for a tree like the one we have a description of,” Grove said.
“That seems about the only thing to do,” Harry said; “the tracks aren’t going to tell us anything.”
Steuben Junction was in a kind of opening in the woods; it was like a little village in a clearing, sort of. Part of those woods we had come through in the auto. In the part where the tracks ran north of the village the woods were awful thick and were right up close to the tracks on both sides. It was a single track road.
We knew that Brent didn’t know anything except just what we had told him about that big balsam poplar, and we thought that he wouldn’t have bothered his head about that in looking for a good place to camp. We thought he’d just wait for us.
When we had gone a little distance from the village, we divided into two parties, and each kept in the woods a little way off from the tracks, one party on the west side and the other party on the east side.
Harry said, “Well, there’s one good sign and that is that none of the trees in this woods are poplars, except a few dead ones. What we have to do is to hunt for a big, tall, husky stranger. That old giant of the north doesn’t die as easily as most of the poplar family.”
“That’s a good name for it,” I said; “the Giant of the North.”