“And that’s just what’s what,” responded the sheriff, nodding as he examined the contents of the bag. “We hope to get ’em in time, because it means a cool thousand to us, perhaps more, because the reward may have been doubled after we hit the woods. Sometimes we’ve been hot on the track, and then again they’d give us the slip, and we’d lose ground. I’ve often wished we had dogs along; but they’re hard to find; and people, somehow, don’t like to see dogs up here, since the law put a ban on deer hounding.”
“I’d like to keep just one of them tools, to remember my find by, if you didn’t have any objection,” suggested Step Hen anxiously.
“You can keep the whole bunch if you like, son,” answered the sheriff; “we don’t need any such evidence against these birds, if only we can ketch ’em. They’re carrying all the evidence we want, in the shape of the entire capital of the bank they looted so slick.”
“I suppose they broke open the safe in the usual way, with dynamite?” Thad remarked, quietly.
“Just what they did, though how you guessed it I don’t see,” the sheriff replied.
“We found something in the bag that told us that,” and Thad, as he spoke, stepped over to the tree, in the crotch of which he had placed the stick of dynamite.
Step Hen turned red in the face as he heard the story told of how he had just been about to throw the unknown substance into the fire when prevented. The lengthy sheriff looked reproachfully toward him, and remarked, mildly:
“You want to go slow, my boy, about handling things that you never saw before. I wouldn’t like to say what would have happened to the lot of you, once this dropped into that red-hot fire. Many a fool miner has been blown to atoms because he tried to dry damp dynamite out in an oven, and let it get too hot. Better ask yourself a few questions before you go to trying tricks with strange things.”
“Will you spend the night with us, Mr. Sheriff?” asked Thad, thinking that they ought to appear hospitable, as every one who goes into the great timber should be.
Besides, he rather fancied this Maine sheriff, and believed that a session in his company alongside the blazing camp-fire, would be both pleasant and profitable, as doubtless the officer could relate many things of interest to the scouts.