“Seein’s how you’ve growed so all-fired smart so suddent, maybe you’ll tell me who went up the old loggin’ road t’other night and robbed me of nigh onto a cord of dry stove-wood?” said Dan’l Evans.
“Maybe I will, Pa. What’ll you give me if I tell you?”
“Give you? Nothin’! You don’t know, anyhow.”
“Don’t I know who’s got a horse that’s lame on the nigh fore-foot and a wagon with a hind wheel that wobbles? I see the tracks yesterday and studied ’em.”
“You figger it was Tim Swan stole the wood. Well, you’re wrong. I suspicioned him myself, the minute I see the wood was gone, because Tim’s a born thief an’ lives handy. But it warn’t Tim took the wood. I mooched round his place for over an hour an’ couldn’t find a stick of it. Maybe it was the tracks of a rabbit you studied so hard.”
“Maybe it was, Pa. Anyhow, I follered them rabbit-tracks along to Tim’s gate and past it and clear on to Widow Craig’s yard; and there’s the wood in her wood-shed; and she paid the rabbit three dollars for it.”
“Well, I never!” exclaimed Mrs. Evans.
A few days after the frying of the family pancakes by Molly and within two weeks after the passing of the sportsman in the care of Uncle Bill Tangler, seven of the scholars who attended the little school at the Bend came down with the mumps and on Thursday Miss Carten announced that the school would close for a week at least—and perhaps longer. The Evanses had escaped the epidemic, having been victims of the malady two years before. Molly and Amos went racing home, making the echoes repeat their whoops of joy. Young Dan walked more soberly behind them, for there were many things on his mind and he meant to use his time—while the mumps kept the schoolhouse closed—to test several theories that, ever since he had read the book with the green cover, had been simmering away in the back of his head.
But Young Dan got no leisure in which to test his theories—at least he was not able to try them in the exact manner he had planned—for a stirring and mysterious event that roused excitement in the whole Oxbow region occurred less than twenty-four hours after the vacation began. Miss Carten disappeared. She dropped from sight as completely and as mysteriously as if a silent airplane had swooped down at night out of a dark sky and had carried her aloft like a great-horned owl stealing a birdling. On Friday someone asked for Miss Carten at the Troller farm where she boarded.
“She went to a party over to Cameron’s las’ night an’ took her suitcase with her; I thought as how she’d stop the night with Lizzy Cameron,” said Mrs. Troller.