They passed out of sight, and breathless and palsied, Hannibal crept about a corner of the tavern. He must be sure! The door of the bar stood open; the lamps were still burning, and the upturned chairs and a broken table told of the struggle that had taken place there. The boy rested his hand on the top step as he stared fearfully into the room. His palm came away with a great crimson splotch. But he was not satisfied yet. He must be sure—sure! He passed around the building as the men had done and crossed the truck patch to the mouth of the lane. Here he slid through the fence into the corn-field, and, well sheltered, worked his way down the rows. Presently he heard a distant sound—a splash—surely it was a splash—.
A little later the men came up the lane, to disappear in the direction of the tavern. Hannibal peered after them. His very terrors, while they wrenched and tortured him, gave him a desperate kind of courage. As the gloom hid the two men, he started forward again; he must know the meaning of that sound—that splash, if it was a splash. He reached the end of the cornfield, climbed the fence, and entered a deadening of slashed and mutilated timber. In the long wet grass he found where the men had dragged their burden. He reached down and swept his hand to and fro—once—twice—the third time his little palm came away red and discolored.
There was the first pale premonition of dawn in the sky, and as he hurried on the light grew, and the black trunks of trees detached themselves from the white mist that filled the woods and which the dawn made visible. There was light enough for him to see that he was following the trail left by the men; he could distinguish where the dew had been brushed from the long grass. Advancing still farther, he heard the clear splash of running water, an audible ripple that mounted into a silver cadence. Day was breaking now. The lifeless gray along the eastern horizon had changed to orange. Still following the trail, he emerged upon the bank of the Elk River, white like the woods with its ghostly night sweat.
The dull beat of the child's heart quickened as he gazed out on the swift current that was hurrying on with its dreadful secret. Then the full comprehension of his loss seemed to overwhelm him and he was utterly desolate. Sobs shook him, and he dropped on his knees, holding fast to the stock of his rifle.
“Uncle Bob—Uncle Bob, come back! Can't you come back!” he wailed miserably. Presently he staggered to his feet. Convulsive sobs still wrenched his little body. What was he to do? Those men—his Uncle Bob's murderers—would go to his room; they would find his empty bed and their search for him would begin! Not for anything would he have gone back through the corn-field or the lane to the road. He had the courage to go forward, but not to retrace his steps; and the river, deep and swift, barred his path. As he glanced about, he saw almost at his feet a dug-out, made from a single poplar log. It was secured to an overhanging branch by a length of wild grape-vine. With one last fearful look off across the deadening in the direction of the tavern, he crept down to the water's edge and entered the canoe. In a moment, he had it free from its lashing and the rude craft was bumping along the bank in spite of his best efforts with the paddle. Then a favoring current caught it and swept it out toward the center of the stream.
It was much too big and clumsy for him to control without the stream's help, though he labored doggedly with his paddle. Now he was broadside to the current, now he was being spun round and round, but always he was carried farther and farther from the spot where he had embarked. He passed about a bend; and a hundred yards beyond, about a second bend; then the stream opened up straight before him a half-mile of smooth running water. Far down it, at the point where the trees met in the unbroken line of the forest and the water seemed to vanish mysteriously, he could distinguish a black moving object; some ark or raft, doubtless.
In the smoother water of the long reach, Hannibal began to make head against the flood. The farther shore became the nearer, and finally he drove the bow of his canoe up on a bit of shelving bank, and seizing his pack and rifle, sprang ashore. Panting and exhausted, he paused just long enough to push the canoe out into the stream again, and then, with his rifle and pack in his hands, turned his small tear-stained face toward the wooded slope beyond. As he toiled up it in the wide silence of the dawn, a mournful wind burst out of the north, filling the air about him with withered leaves and the dead branches of trees.
CHAPTER VIII. ON THE RIVER
Betty stood under a dripping umbrella in the midst of a drenching downpour, her boxes and trunks forming a neat pyramid of respectable size beside her. She was somewhat perturbed in spirit, since they contained much elaborate finery all in the very latest eastern fashion, spoils that were the fruit of a heated correspondence with Tom, who hadn't seemed at all alive to the fact that Betty was nearly eighteen and in her own right a young woman of property. A tarpaulin had been thrown over the heap, and with one eye on it and the other on the stretch of yellow canal up which they were bringing the fast packet Pioneer, she was waiting impatiently to see her belongings transferred to a place of safety.