Having left the stranger in the hut with the broken roof, bruised and unconscious and fatigued, without food or water or blankets or matches or snowshoes, in complete ignorance of the one right way of a hundred wrong ones of escape from that place, Henry Dangler and his big son Steve made straight for Forkville. The snow blotted out their tracks behind them. They visited half a dozen places in the village, including two stores, the forge and the hotel, and were puzzled to encounter only women and children. They asked where the men had gone to, and were puzzled by the answers of the women and children.
“There’s somethin’ wrong,” said Hen.
“It sure looks like it,” agreed Steve. “That dang old Hassock woman had a mean slant to her eye.”
They headed for the settlement on Goose Creek with a growing uneasiness in their tough breasts. They took the road, for it was the shortest way. The new snow had filled up the tracks of the sleds and also of the pung in which young McPhee had brought the constable. They hadn’t gone far before they were startled by a jangle of silvery bells close behind them, sounding suddenly out of the muffling now. They leapt aside into the underbrush and crouched and turned. They saw a large man, white as wool, slip by in a pung behind a long-gaited nag. He was there and past in a dozen seconds. He had sat hunched forward as if bowed by the weight of snow on him. He had not looked to the right or the left.
“The deputy sheriff,” whispered Henry to his son.
“Hell!” whispered Steve.
“Guess we were too late.”
“Guess so. What’ll we do now?”
“Reckon I’ll go along an’ see what’s happened. Maybe the old man will trick ’em yet.”
“You best come back with me, pa. I jist thought of somethin’ that’ll maybe work out all right.”