Matt had a bad two minutes waiting for Pryne to hitch the horses and fearing he would come to the rear of the wagon and discover the slashed bag of feed. But Pryne was apparently unsuspicious.
Turning away from the tree to which he had hitched the horses, he called to Matt and Goldstein to follow him.
Their path took them through the old sugar "bush," among maples that were dead and dying and whose trunks were deeply scarred by the sap hunters. Presently an old log building came into view.
"There's the place," said Pryne.
Part of the building was nothing more than a tumble-down shed. One end of the structure, however, was walled in, and seemed to have been made habitable by the use of rough boards.
A length of stovepipe stuck up through the roof—about the only visible sign that the place was used as a dwelling.
With Pryne in the lead, the odd little group moved around the side of the log wall to a door.
To say that Matt's heart did not beat more quickly, or that visions of violence did not float before his mental gaze, would be to say that he was not human.
He had a keen realization of the dangers into which he was about to throw himself. The moment he passed the door deception would be a thing of the past. Grattan would recognize him as a stranger—a prying stranger who had come to the sugar camp with the intention of securing the Eye of Buddha.
Matt's problem was to engage Grattan's attention, and keep him from going to extremes, until McGlory should arrive with reënforcements.