“I’m off, this morning,” he explained.  “In an hour now.  Garry, how can I possibly reduce this mass to packing possibility?”

“Stop running around in circles!” commanded Garry, thunderstruck.  “What’s it all about?  Where are you going?”

“I’m going,” said Kenny with his chin out and his eyes defiant, “to hunt Brian.”

Garry stared blankly at the packing litter and the tall Irishman in the center of it wearily mopping his forehead.  It was impossible to locate the crags he must have leaped to reach his spectacular decision.  They were shrouded in mystery.

“You mean,” said Garry after a while, “that you will tour vaguely off, seeking a farm on a hill, a wood, a river, a youngster in patches and Brian’s trail of camp fires?”

“Precisely,” said Kenny with detestable confidence.  “See, even you mark the clues with perfect logic.”

“A farm on a hill,” exclaimed Garry, “is of course a clue with absolute individuality.  So is a wood and a river.”

“So,” supplemented Kenny with the calm, unhurried air of one who scores an unexpected point, “is a postmark on a letter.”

Startled, Garry reached for the envelope.  Kenny put it in his pocket.

“An obscure village in Pennsylvania,” he explained with dignity, “where your wood and your river will likely have definite individuality.  I shall go there.”

Garry scented danger and considered the outcome in horrified dismay, regretting his rash flurry of sympathy.  It had become a boomerang.  What if Brian’s protege in a fit of remorse saw fit to keep his sister posted?  Kenny would indeed find clues.  The possibility filled him with foreboding.

“Kenny,” he said with some heat, “I consider that you have absolutely no right to take advantage of my letter to hunt Brian down.  I’m sorry I sent it in.  If he wanted you to know where he is, he’d write you.  I wish to Heaven I’d thought of that postmark!”

“I shall tramp every inch on foot!” swore Kenny proudly.  “Brian will appreciate the spirit of the thing if you do not.”

There was relief at least in that.  Garry drew a long breath.  If Kenny tramped his way, another inexplicable factor in his lunacy, by the time he reached the farmhouse Brian would be well on ahead.  And Garry was bitterly familiar with Kenny’s incapacity for steadiness of any kind.  Kenny, it developed, was thinking in similar vein.

“I take it there will be an interval of waiting before remorse will lead the kid to write to his sister,” he said.  “Otherwise I’d proceed to the farmhouse at once in a flying machine.”

The romance of this seemed to strike him strongly for an interval.  Then, mercifully, he repeated his intention of tramping.

“And then?” said Garry.

“Then,” said Kenny with the utmost optimism, “I’ll pick up his trail at the farmhouse and from there I’ll travel night and day until I overtake him.”