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“Tribbses,” or “Tribbs’s Run,” was devoted to the work of cutting down the pines midway on a long regularly sloping mountain-side, which allowed the trunks, after they were trimmed and cut into suitable lengths, to be slid down through rude runs, or artificial channels, into the valley below, where they were collected by teams and conveyed to the nearest mills. The business was simple in the extreme, and was carried on by Tribbs senior, two men with saws and axes, and the natural laws of gravitation. The house was a long log cabin; several sheds roofed with bark or canvas seemed consistent with the still lingering summer and the heated odors of the pines, but were strangely incongruous to those white patches on the table-land and the white tongue stretching from the ridge to the valley. But the master was familiar with those Sierran contrasts, and as he had never ascended the trail before, it might be only the usual prospect of the dwellers there. At this moment Mr. Tribbs appeared from the cabin, with his axe on his shoulder. Nodding carelessly to the master, he was moving away, when the latter stopped him.

“Is Jackson here?” he asked.

“No,” said the father, half impatiently, still moving on. “Hain’t seen him since yesterday.”

“Nor has he been at school,” said the master, “either yesterday or to-day.”

Mr. Tribbs looked puzzled and grieved. “Now I reckoned you had kep’ him in for some devilment of his’n, or lessons.”

“Not ALL NIGHT!” said the master, somewhat indignant at this presumption of his arbitrary functions.

“Humph!” said Mr. Tribbs. “Mariar!” Mrs. Tribbs made her appearance in the doorway. “The schoolmaster allows that Jackson ain’t bin to school at all.” Then, turning to the master, he added, “Thar! you settle it between ye,” and quietly walked away.

Mrs. Tribbs looked by no means satisfied with or interested in the proposed tete-a-tete. “Hev ye looked in the bresh” (i. e., brush or underwood) “for him?” she said querulously.

“No,” said the master, “I came here first. There are two other boys missing,–Providence Smith and Julian Fleming. Did either of them”–

But Mrs. Tribbs had interrupted him with a gesture of impatient relief. “Oh, that’s all, is it? Playin’ hookey together, in course. ‘Scuse me, I must go back to my bakin’.” She turned away, but stopped suddenly, touched, as the master fondly believed, by some tardy maternal solicitude. But she only said: “When he DOES come back, you just give him a whalin’, will ye?” and vanished into her kitchen.

The master rode away, half ashamed of his foolish concern for the derelicts. But he determined to try Smith’s father, who owned a small rancho lower down on a spur of the same ridge. But the spur was really nearer Hemlock Hill, and could have been reached more directly by a road from there. He, however, kept along the ridge, and after half an hour’s ride was convinced that Jackson Tribbs could have communicated with Provy Smith without coming nearer Hemlock Hill, and this revived his former belief that they were together. He found the paternal Smith engaged in hoeing potatoes in a stony field. The look of languid curiosity with which he had regarded the approach of the master changed to one of equally languid aggression as he learned the object of his visit.

“Wot are ye comin’ to ME for? I ain’t runnin’ your school,” he said slowly and aggressively. “I started Providence all right for it mornin’ afore last, since when I never set eyes on him. That lets ME out. My business, young feller, is lookin’ arter the ranch. Yours, I reckon, is lookin’ arter your scholars.”

“I thought it my business to tell you your son was absent from school,” said the master coldly, turning away. “If you are satisfied, I have nothing more to say.” Nevertheless, for the moment he was so startled by this remarkable theory of his own responsibility in the case that he quite accepted the father’s callousness,–or rather it seemed to him that his unfortunate charges more than ever needed his protection. There was still the chance of his hearing some news from Julian Fleming’s father; he lived at some distance, in the valley on the opposite side of Hemlock Hill; and thither the master made his way. Luckily he had not gone far before he met Mr. Fleming, who was a teamster, en route. Like the fathers of the other truants, he was also engaged in his vocation. But, unlike the others, Fleming senior was jovial and talkative. He pulled up his long team promptly, received the master’s news with amused interest, and an invitation to spirituous refreshment from a demijohn in his wagon.