Here he paused in astonishment. The place was silent, more silent than he had known it even in the dead of night. The gleam of coals on the cooking platform and the dim bulk of cabins looming in the dark were the only signs that men lived here.
“Hello there!” he shouted.
To his utter bewilderment there came no answer.
An hour before he had left thirty men here. Now there was not one. What could it mean? Again cold dread gripped his heart.
Turning, he hurried down a logging road to the edge of a broad creek. There the white bulk of a large flat-bottomed boat greeted him.
“They didn’t take the Maria Theresa, anyway.” There was a comfort in that. “Fellow’d sure be up against it a hundred miles from the coast without a boat.”
Even as he thought this, his ears caught the steady dip-dip of pit-pan paddles.
“Hello! Hello there!” he shouted.
Again there came no answer. Even the paddles, if paddles there had been, were silent.
“Huh!”