CHAPTER I
THE STRANGER’S BOOK
Young Dan Evans lived in the back country on the Oxbow with his parents and his brothers and sisters. For as long as he could remember, his Uncle Bill Tangler, his mother’s brother, had been an irregular member of the household.
Young Dan obtained a meagre and intermittent schooling between his ninth and sixteenth years, at the Bend, three miles below his father’s farm. His terms were frequently broken by the weather, the conditions of the road and matters of domestic economy. Sometimes Uncle Bill helped him with his books. There seemed to be nothing that Uncle Bill did not know something about.
In October of Young Dan’s last year of school, Uncle Bill brought a sportsman from New York or London or Chicago or Montreal—from one of those outside places, anyhow—to Dan’l Evans’s house. Uncle Bill and the sportsman were on their way in to the former’s camp far up beyond the Prongs. They arrived, by canoe, just before dusk and were off again half an hour after sun-up.
Young Dan was sent by his mother to the spare bedroom, to make up the bed that had been occupied by the sportsman. In five minutes he was due to start for school. He had no more than crossed the threshold when he exclaimed, “He was smokin’ in bed!” On the chair near the dented pillow, about the base of the little lamp, lay two cigar butts and several deposits of ashes. Young Dan was distressed, for by what little he had seen of the stranger he had considered him to be a very superior person; and yet here was proof positive that he was possessed of a habit that was looked upon, in that household, as both low and reckless. He recollected a few of the words which his mother had addressed to Uncle Bill on the occasion of her finding that versatile bachelor smoking in bed. “It’s lazy an’ it’s dangerous an’ it ain’t respectable,” she had said—among other things.
Young Dan approached the bed.
“And him from a city full of street cars and schools,” he murmured. “He’d ought to know better.”
Then something caught his eye and distracted his attention from the tell-tale butts and ashes. It was a book with a green cover. It lay open and face down on the bright rag-carpet, just beneath the edge of the bed. He stared at it for a moment, then snatched it up and thrust it inside his coat. At one glance he had seen that it was a story book. Good! On the Oxbow story books were almost as rare as ropes of pearls; Young Dan was as unacquainted with fiction as a city alley-cat is with yellow cream. In this case discovery of the discarded book seemed to imply ownership and he appropriated the volume with the intention of exploring its pages undisturbed by his younger brothers and sisters who would be sure to demand a share in the volume once their eyes fell upon its bright cover.
Young Dan hurried through the task that had been set for him and started for the schoolhouse at the Bend, accompanied by Molly, aged eleven, and Amos, aged nine. His canvas-wrapped school books and the lunch for three were in his bag; and the book with the green cover was still inside his coat. Here, against his very ribs, lay an unknown treasure—a treasure of valuable information concerning far lands or the stars themselves, perhaps, or perhaps a treasure of magical entertainment. How was he to make an opportunity for investigating it unobserved?
Suddenly he thought of a plan. He suggested a race.