He dismissed the phaeton at the bridge and stared up and down the river in gloomy indecision.  Upstream or downstream?  Heaven alone knew!  Whichever way he elected to go would be the wrong way.  Fate, who had saddled him with Silas and the mule, would see to that.

Then, having resentfully put his mind to it, he evolved some logic.  Brian, leaving the wood by the river, would not go back the way he had come.  He would travel upstream and mail his letter when he found the village.  Kenny conversely had found the village first.  Therefore he must travel downstream to find the wood; downstream through a disheartening tangle of bush and tree and brier and maybe snakes and marshes.

With a groan he plunged into the wood, keeping well up the slope to avoid the lower marshes.  He must spur himself to the start or he’d never finish.  But his mind was in ferment.  What if the boy had written to his sister?  Must he vagabond forth again with the morning into a world of bucolic dawns, alarm-clock farmers, roosters, corncribs and mules?  By the powers of wildfire, no!  He would buy a motorcycle.  On tires or toes he could wind Brian around his finger and he would!

In a flurry of bitter abstraction, he floundered into a marsh and emerged mud-spattered and indignant.  Briers tore at him.  Below the sun-mottled river glided endlessly on in sylvan peace.  The other shore looked better.  There the wind-bent shag of trees was greener save when, with a hint of rain, the breeze turned up an under-leaf ripple of silver.  He met no one; no one but a madman, he reflected, would explore the tangled banks of a hermit river.

At sunset, after seven slow weariful miles downstream in the brooding quiet of a hot afternoon murmurous with birds and the sound of the river, he came to the end of his journey—­a wood, stretching steeply up a cliff to a farmhouse lost in trees and ivy.  It was on the other side of the river and there was no bridge.

Kenny, who believed all things of Fate when the pet or victim was himself, refused absolutely to credit her crowning whimsy.  In a fury of exasperation he clambered down to the water’s edge and washed his face; moodily mopping it with his handkerchief he stared across the water.

The sun in a last blaze was going down behind the higher line of trees.  Roof peaks and chimney lay against a mat of gold.  Crows winging toward the forest to the south speckled the sky behind the chimney.  To Kenny’s ardent fancy, the old house, built of gray and ancient stone, became a rugged cameo set in gold and trees.  Whatever arable land belonged to the hill-farm lay away from the river.  North and south loomed only a primitive maze of trees.

A path wound steeply down to the river’s edge and to a boat.  Kenny stared at it in some resentment.

Well, if he must hunt a bridge he would rest there first beneath the willow.  The sun had made him drowsy.  He might even camp on the river bank and if ever a foot came down the path and toward the boat, he would fire his revolver into the air and demand attention.  The prospect pleased him.  He went toward the willow.