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During the second winter, after school had closed in the old Squire's district, Willis Murch, a young friend of mine who lived near us, went on a trapping trip to the headwaters of Lurvey's Stream, where the oxen had disappeared and where he had a camp. One Saturday he came home for supplies and invited me to go back with him and spend Sunday.
Addison, who had just driven in with a load of long rafters from the old Squire's mill on Lurvey's Stream, called to us to help him unload them. "Why, what's going to be built?" we exclaimed. "Haymaker," he replied shortly. The answer did not enlighten us. "'Haymaker'?" repeated Halstead wonderingly. "Yes, haymaker," said Addison. "So bear a hand here.
After supper, when we had gathered in the sitting-room, grandmother quietly handed him Mrs. Lurvey's letter, with the notification about the birch. "This came while you were away, Joseph," she said to him, while the rest of us, sitting very still, looked on, keenly interested to see how he would take it.
Finally, after another two hours or so of hard going, we came out on Lurvey's Stream about half a mile below the camp, which was on the other bank. A foot or more of water was running yellow over the ice; but the ice itself was still firm, and we were able to cross on it. Even before we came in sight of the camp, we smelled wood smoke. "Halse is there!" I exclaimed.
Since I was now two or three miles north of Lurvey's Mills, I took another and shorter road than that by which I had come. As it chanced, that road took me by the Dole farm, where little Ike lived. I saw no one about the old, unpainted house or the long, weathered barn, which with its sheds stood alongside the road.
Their one consoling thought was that, if they could not get out, their captor, whoever he was, could not get in. They were a little cheered, too, when they realized that the wagon was apparently following the road that led toward home. But when they had gone about three or four miles and had come to the branch road that led to Lurvey's Mills, they felt the old "saloon" turn off from the main road.
But he had settled and gone to work at the place that was afterwards known as Lurvey's Mills; and he soon began to prosper, for he was possessed of keen mother wit and had energy and resolution enough for half a dozen ordinary men.
While crossing Lurvey's Stream, the team had broken through the ice where the current beneath was swift. He had saved the oxen; but the sled, with our beef pork, beans and potatoes, had been drawn under and carried away, he knew not how far, under the ice. A stare of dismay from the entire hungry party followed this announcement. It looked like no supper after a hard day's work!
There was one place, however, where we knew they could be found, and that was in the great fir swamp along Lurvey's Stream, on the way up to the hay meadows.
The line of traps, he said, began at a large pine-tree near the head of Stoss Pond and thence extended round about through the then unbroken forest for a distance of perhaps fifteen miles to a birch-bark camp on Lurvey's Stream that the old trapper had built to shelter himself from storms two years before. Billy wanted to go but his mother would not consent to his going alone.
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