upted him with a gesture of impatient relief.
"Oh, that's all, is it? Playin' hookey together, in course. 'Scuse me,
I must go back to my bakin'." She turned away, but stopped suddenly,
touched, as the master fondly believed, by some tardy maternal
solicitude. But she only said: "When he DOES come back, you just give
him a whalin', will ye?" and vanished into her kitchen.

The master rode away, half ashamed of his foolish concern for the
derelicts. But he determined to try Smith's father, who owned a small
rancho lower down on a spur of the same ridge. But the spur was really
nearer Hemlock Hill, and could have been reached more directly by a road
from there. He, however, kept along the ridge, and after half an hour's
ride was convinced that Jackson Tribbs could have communicated with
Provy Smith without coming nearer Hemlock Hill, and this revived his
former belief that they were together. He found the paternal Smith
engaged in hoeing potatoes in a stony field. The look of languid
curiosity with which he had regarded the approach of the master changed
to one of equally languid aggression as he learned the object of his
visit.

"Wot are ye comin' to ME for? I ain't runnin' your school," he said
slowly and aggressively. "I started Providence all right for it mornin'
afore last, since when I never set eyes on him. That lets ME out. My
business, young feller, is lookin' arter the ranch. Yours, I reckon, is
lookin' arter your scholars."

"I thought it my business to tell you your son was absent from school,"
said the master coldly, turning away. "If you are satisfied, I have
nothing more to say." Nevertheless, for the moment he was so startled
by this remarkable theory of his own responsibility in the case that
he quite accepted the father's callousness,--or rather it seemed to him
that his unfortunate charges more than ever needed his protection. There
was still the chance of his hearing some news from Julian Fleming's
father; he lived at some distance, in the valley on the opposite side
of Hemlock Hill; and thither the master made his way. Luckily he had not
gone far before he met Mr. Fleming, who was a teamster, en route. Like
the fathers of the other truants, he was also engaged in his vocation.
But, unlike the others, Fleming senior was jovial and talkative. He
pulled up his long team promptly, received the master's news with amused
interest, and an invitation to spirituous refreshment from a demijohn in
his wagon.