“It is just as mean as it can be!” gasped Helen, plodding on.

“The boys wouldn’t leave much o’ that constable if they caught him playin’ tag for such a man as Blent, at Bullhide,” Ann Hicks declared, with warmth.

“This Blent,” said Bobbins, seriously, “seems to have everybody about Logwood buffaloed.  What do you suppose your father will say to the constable taking the men with him this morning to hunt Jerry down?”

This question he put to Ralph Tingley and the latter flushed angrily.

“You wait!” he exclaimed.  “Father will be angry, I bet.  I told mother not to let the men have anything to do with the hunt, but you know how women are.  She was afraid.  She said that if Blent and the constable were within their legal rights——­”

“All bosh!” snapped Isadore Phelps.

“I do not think Mrs. Tingley would have let them go with Daggett if she’d had the least idea they would be able to find Jerry,” observed Helen, sagely.

“And they won’t,” put in Ruth, with assurance.  “I know he can hide away on this island like a fox in a burrow.”

“But he’ll find it mighty cold sleeping out, this weather,” remarked Bobbins.

“He sure will!” agreed Tom.

The party went ahead as rapidly as possible, but even the stronger of the boys found it hard to climb the steeper ascents through the deep snow.

“Crackey!” exclaimed Isadore.  “I know I’m slipping back two steps to every one I get ahead.”

“Nonsense, Izzy,” returned Helen.  “For if you did that, you had better turn around and travel the other way; then you’d back up the hill!”

They had to wait and rest every few yards.  The rocks were so huge that they often had to go out of the way for some distance to get around them.  Although it could not be more than five miles, as the crow flies, from the lodge to the lone pine, in two hours they still had the hardest part of the journey before them.

“I had no idea we should be so long at it,” Tom confessed.

“It’s lucky Heavy didn’t come with us,” chuckled Helen.

“Why?”

“She would have been starved to death before this, and the idea of going the rest of the distance before turning back for home and luncheon would have destroyed her reason, I am sure.”

“Then,” said Ruth, amused by this extravagant language, “poor Heavy would have been first dead and then crazy!  Consider an insane corpse!”

They came out at last upon the foot of the last ascent.  The eminence seemed to be a smooth, cone-shaped hill.  On it grew a number of trees, but the enormous old pine, lightning-riven and dead at the top, stood much taller than any of the other trees.

Here and there they caught glimpses of chasms and steep ravines that seemed to split the rocky island to the edge of the water.  When the snow did not cover the ground there might be paths to follow, but at this time the young explorers had to use their judgment in climbing the heights as best they might.