Page:Post - Uncle Abner (Appleton, 1918).djvu/119

 concealed the booty until now and had just come back for it.

The thrill of adventure tingled in my blood. We were on the trail of the robbers and they could not easily escape us. The one who had ridden this horse could not be far away, since his track in the brook was muddy when we found it; but why had he crossed the brook in the direction of the burned house? The way over the hill toward the house was wholly in the open—clean sod, not even a tree. The man on foot could not have been out of sight of us when we rode across the brook and round the brow of the hill—but he was out of sight. We sat there in our saddles and searched the land, lying smooth and open before us. There was the burned house below, bare as my hand, and the meadows, all open to the eye. A rabbit could not have hidden—where was the rider of that worn-out, sleeping horse?

Abner sat there looking down at this clean, open land. A man could not vanish into the air; he could not hide in a wisp of blue grass; he could not cross three hundred acres of open country while his track in a running brook remained muddy. He could have reached the brow of the hill and perhaps gone down to the house, but he could not have passed the meadows and the pasture field beyond without wings on his shoulders.

The morning was on its way; the air was like lotus. The sun, still out of sight, was beginning to gild the 106