. And after a time he felt a small hand touch his
sleeve; he felt a wet cheek pressed tight to his own.

"Oh, don't you feel so badly, too, Uncle Cal," Barbara sobbed.
"Please--please! Because he _is_ coming back! He told me he would--he
told me he would, himself!"

CHAPTER VI

MY MAN O'MARA

For a week and more Caleb Hunter scoured the surrounding country. He
whipped over the hills in every direction, half hopeful that he might
overtake the boy who had gone in the night. But none of the farmers on
the outlying roads had seen pass their way a little foot traveler such
as he described, and after a time even that small hope died.

When Dexter Allison came over the next day, his face far more perturbed
than Caleb had ever before seen it by the news which Barbara, in tears,
had carried to him, Caleb found that his anger had somehow oozed away
during the night. Allison's concern was too genuine to be feigned; and
Caleb learned too, that morning, that beneath his neighbor's amusement
at the boy there had always been a strain of admiration for his sturdy
gravity and more than a bit of wonder at his uncanny knowledge of
things which were as sealed books to Dexter.

Together the two men searched for Steve, driving in silence through the
country, until they both realized that the search was useless. And at
last one day in early fall, Caleb started alone upon his errand into
that stretch of timber to the north which the boy himself had vaguely
designated as "up-river."

He spent a week in the saddle before he located the cabin of the
"Jenkinses" in an isolated clearing upon the main branch of the river.
If the journey could have been made cross-country, straight through the
wilderness itself, it would have been no more than a ten-mile ride from
that cabin to the same huge valley at the headwaters of the east
branch, where he and Dexter and the boy had camped only a few days
before. But it was a two days' journey around the backbone of that
ridge alone, by trail. And even then, when he did locate the
"Jenkinses," it took hours of quiet argument before Caleb could
convince those shy and suspicious people that his errand was an honest
one. Eventually they did come to believe him; they led him, a-foot,
another half mile up the timber-fringed stream, to a log cabin set back
in the balsams upon a needle carpeted knoll. And they stood and stared
in stolid wonder at this portly man in riding breeches and leather