“I just bet you he’s found where George sat down and ate up every crumb of that grub,” muttered Bumpus, whose mind seemed to be wholly concerned with the question of the lost supplies.
“George was joined here by his pal, who must have been hanging out, waiting for him,” Giraffe told them; and as he examined the tracks further he added; “and say, I reckon now that second fellow got hurt some way, while he was cooped up in the black hole under the cabin floor.”
“Now how do you make that out, Giraffe?” asked Davy.
“Why, I can see that he limps like everything,” the other went on to say, doubtless applying his knowledge of woodcraft to the case. “One foot drags every step he takes, and it didn’t do that before, I happen to know. That’s why George volunteered to do the cribbing all by himself, while the other waited.”
“That makes two to handle instead of one, doesn’t it?” Allan remarked; and once more Bumpus groaned.
“Two is a whole lot worse than one, to get away with things,” he observed, with a piteous air of resignation, as though he was now perfectly satisfied they would none of them ever see the first sign of the stolen provisions again.
“If there’s a trail why can’t we start in, and track the two hoboes down?” suggested Davy vigorously.
They had followed Giraffe, so that all of them were just back of him at this time. The tall scout, however, shook his head in a disappointing way.
“I’d like to try that the worst kind,” he remarked, “but I reckon it’s no go. You can hardly see the footprints here, and they get fainter as they go on. Besides, we’d make all manner of noise creeping through this scrub, and they’d be wise to our coming, so they could keep moving off. There’s a better way to capture George than that, fellows.”
“Yes,” added Thad, “we can comb the island from one end to the other. It can’t be of any great size, you see; and by forming a line across at the top we could cover about every foot of it. In the end we’d corner the tramps, and make them surrender. We’ve got the whole day before us, and the sun promises to shine, too, so we can count on its being warmer.”