y occurred to him that his uncle must be out of patience, and
that he had been longer than he thought for.

He found too that he had run farther than he thought, and he was getting
pretty hot and breathless by the time he trotted out of the wood, and
into the sandy lane, where, instead of his uncle's face as he sat
looking back impatiently in the chair, there was the bare road and
nothing more, save a red admiral butterfly flitting here and there and
settling in the dust.

"He must have asked somebody passing to wheel him back," thought Tom,
who immediately began to play Red Indian or Australian black, and look
for the trail--to wit, the thin wheel-marks left by the chair. But
though he found those which had been made in coming plainly lining the
soft sandy road, and ran in different directions toward home, there were
no returning tracks.

"Then he must have gone on," thought Tom; and he ran back to where he
had left his uncle, to see now faintly in the hard road a continuation
of the three wheel-marks, so very distinct from any that would have been
left by cart or carriage, being very narrow, and three instead of two or
four.

He went on slowly trying to trace the wheel-marks, but the road soon
became so hard that he missed them; a few yards farther on he saw the
faint mark made by one, then again two showed, and then they ceased, but
he was on the right track, he knew; and walking rapidly on down the
hill, with his eyes now on the road, now right ahead toward the river
and the ford, he began wondering who could have come along there, and
where his uncle had made whoever it was take him.

"Why it would be miles round to get home this way," thought Tom.
"Perhaps he was thirsty, and asked some one to take him down to the
river, and is waiting."

It was not a good solution of the problem, and he was not satisfied, for
there was no sign of the chair near the ford. But there were traces
again in the sand which had been washed to the side, and here the chair
had made a curve and run close to the bank for a few yards; then out
into the hard road, and he saw no more for a couple of hundred yards,
and then they were on the left-hand side, and Tom's blood began to turn
cold, as they say, for the tracks bore off to the side road leading down
into the sand-pit.

"Why the chair ran away with him, and perhaps he's killed."

At this thought Tom's legs ran away with him down into the thick sandy
road, where the wheel-marks