He remembered how a log had once fallen on Samuel Lapham's leg and broken it when he was out alone in the woods, and he had lain there a whole day before anybody found him.

He thought something like that might have happened to his father.

He searched everywhere, peering with his sharp young eyes among the stumps and between the piles of wood.

"Mebbe father's fainted away," he muttered.
Finally he became sure that his father was nowhere in the clearing, and he raised his voice again and shouted, and hallooed, and listened, and hallooed again, and got no response.
Suddenly a chill seemed to strike Jerome's heart.

He thought of the pond.