llel with
the bends of the river. Instead it crossed the river bridge and went
off at a foolish tangent, disappearing over the crest of a hill. Wild
and wooded country swept steeply down to the river edge. Kenny, who
had made a vow of penitential speed, must continue his search on foot.
The prospect filled him with dismay.

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 wat