_A Night of Searching_
The bonfire was quickly built and stout, willing hands piled upon it the
brush left over from their chopping till the blaze of it rose thirty
feet into the air, illuminating the entire mountain side.
So far as anybody could plan there was nothing else to be done while the
night lasted, except scour the woodlands and thickets round about,
hallooing now and then; but nothing that the boys could do produced any
result. Hour after hour passed and still Tom did not appear.
"It would be useless," said Jack, "to go off into the darkness to look
for him. We simply must wait for daylight, particularly as we don't know
what direction he took. Possibly by daylight we may track him. But
unfortunately there is no snow on the ground."
"Unfortunately there will be snow on the ground before daylight comes,"
said the Doctor, who had conceived a great affection for little Tom,
"and it will obliterate whatever tracks the boy may have made. All the
indications are for snow, and indeed it is beginning to snow now. I tell
you, boys, we must make some torches and study the ground by their
light. Perhaps we may find Tom's tracks before the snow covers them."
The suggestion was no sooner made than it was carried out, and by the
light of great, flaring torches the whole party minutely scanned the
ground, beginning at the cabin door, and prosecuting their researches in
every direction.
After an hour of this work, the Doctor called out from a point near the
chute:
"Come here, boys!" and when they came he said:
"Tom went over the bank at this point. See! Here are his tracks in the
soft earth, and look! There are the bent and broken bushes by which he
let himself down over that cliff. Thank heaven we know now in what
direction to look for him as soon as morning comes. It would be useless
suicide to attempt to follow his trail now."
"Well, I don't know," said Jack. "But I'm ready for that sort of suicide
in behalf of little Tom. Give me your best torch, boys! I'm going to
follow the trail down the mountain. You see Tom may have slipped off a
cliff somewhere down there and broken his legs or rendered himself
helpless in some other way. I'm going to follow him right now, and the
rest of you can come after daylight--which isn't more than half an hour
off now."
"No!" said the Doctor. "If you think best to follow the trail now, we're
going with you, every one of us. But first let us get our guns and some
necessaries. If Tom is hurt anywhere down there I must have some
appliances with which to dress his wounds. If he has fallen into the
hands of the moonshiners we must rescue him, and to that end we must
have guns and ammunition. Let us go over his trail by all means, but let
us go prepared to do him some good when we find him!"
To this thought there was unanimous assent, and instantly the Doctor and
Jim Chenowith hurried back to the house to bring surgical appliances,
guns and ammunition. Meantime Jack, who was greatly excited turned to
the two boys who remained with him, and said, in a voice so cold and
calm that they knew it meant intense emotion--
"Boys! If the moonshiners have caught little Tom and done any harm to
him, I am going to drive every moonshiner out of these mountains and
into a penitentiary or better still to a gibbet, if I have to give my
whole life to it. Will you join me in that? And if I get killed will you
promise to go on with the work?"
By that time the others had returned, and they had caught enough of what
Jack had said to understand its purport. For answer the Doctor grasped
Jack's hand and said with emotion: "To that purpose I pledge my whole
life and all of my fortune! If those beasts have dealt foully with
little Tom, I'll hire and bring here from Baltimore a hundred
desperately courageous men, every one of them armed with the latest
magazine rifle there is and commissioned by the revenue chief, and I
pledge you my honor that when I am through with the job there will not
be a moonshiner left in these mountains! I'll do that, Jack, if I have
to hang for it."
The other boys responded with enthusiasm, "We'll be with you in that
job, Doctor, without any hiring!"
"Thank you, comrades!" That was all that Jack could say before the
strain upon him overcame even his iron nerves, and for a moment he lost
consciousness. It was only for a moment, however. At the end of that
time Jack led the way over the cliff, five torches lighting the journey.
Presently daylight came, and the torches were thrown away.
The trail that Tom had made of broken bushes, cliff growing saplings,
bent down in letting himself drop over bluffs and declivities, and boot
marks where he had scrambled over a ledge, was not very difficult to
follow for a space. But then came a long stretch of shelving rock
entirely bare, with a dense forest growth beyond, where the leaves that
had fallen in the autumn were still a foot deep, and beyond that point
it was impossible to trace Tom's course. After earnest endeavors to
recover the trail, the effort was abandoned, and sadly the little
company made their way back to camp by a circuitous route, for they
could not climb again the cliffs over which they had managed to clamber
down.
On the way back they were encouraged by the hope that they might find
Tom in the camp, when they got there, but in this they were
disappointed.
They were all disposed to sit down and mourn dejectedly, but at that
point the Doctor's scientific knowledge came to the rescue.
"See here, boys," he said; "we've got some strenuous work to do for
Tom's rescue, and we must do some clear and earnest thinking before we
begin it, in order that we may do it in the best way. We're exhausted.
We have passed a night with only two hours or less of sleep, and we've
eaten nothing for fifteen hours, for it's now after nine o'clock. In the
meantime we have made a tiresome journey down the mountain and back
again and worse still--for worry is always more wearing than work--we
have undergone a great stress of anxiety. Now we're going to do all that
human endeavor can do to rescue Tom. To that end we must have strength
in our bodies and alertness in our minds. We must have breakfast at once
and a hearty breakfast at that."
None of the boys had an appetite, but the Doctor insisted and presently
there was a breakfast served, consisting of bacon, cut into paper-thin
slices and broiled on the sharpened point of a stick, held in a blaze
from the fire; corn pones baked to a crisp brown in a skillet, and a
brimming pot of hot and strong coffee. For butter on their bread, the
boys had a mixture of the drippings from their recent roasts--the
venison, the wild boar, the rabbits and the rest--all of which drippings
they had carefully saved for that purpose.
Appetizing as such a breakfast was to hardworking, sleep-losing and
exhausted boys, not one of them felt the least relish for it. It
required all of the Doctor's urging to make them even taste their food,
till presently Harry, who stood outside as a sentinel, threw down his
gun and started away at a break-neck pace, calling out at the top of his
voice as he went:
"There's Tom! There's Tom! There's Tom, and he's all right!"
With that the whole company abandoned breakfast and rushed out to greet
the returning boy. They plied and bombarded him with questions, of
course, until at last he said pleadingly:
"Please, boys, I'm awfully hungry and tired. I'll answer all your
questions after awhile. Just now the only things you really want to know
are that I'm back safe and sound, and that nothing worse has happened to
me than the loss of a night's sleep, a good deal of anxiety about you
fellows, and the getting up of a positively famished appetite. I say,"
he added, as he entered the cabin, "who broiled that bacon?" and as he
asked the question he picked up two or three slices of it and thrust
them one after another into his mouth.
"I did," answered Ed, "and now that you're back, Tom, I'm going to eat a
lot of it too."
"Well cut three or four times as much more of it," Tom said, slipping
still another slice of the dainty between his teeth, and following it
with a mouthful of corn pone, "and I'll help you toast it. But don't
let's talk till we eat something to talk on."
Ed quickly cut a great plateful of the bacon slices, and every boy in
the party except the one on guard duty, sharpened a stick and helped in
the broiling.
Tom had brought their appetites back with him.