“And you can count on me to help you all I’m able to,” said Thad. “There are a lot of things I don’t know, myself. Allan, here, is teaching me a heap about following a trail, and I’m enjoying it more than I can explain. Nothing like the practical experience, after all. The book-taught scout is all very well, but he has to change a lot of his ideas when he comes to see the same things really and truly done. And some of them are so different from his notion that he can hardly recognize ’em. What is it, Allan?”
This last was directed toward the tracker, who had suddenly shown evidences of excitement. They saw him bend down and more closely examine the ground in front.
Then he whistled, and turned a face toward his chums on which they could plainly read new anxiety.
“It beats anything how they could have just happened to cross the trail of Bumpus,” he observed.
Thad instantly jumped at conclusions.
“Meaning our old acquaintances. Hank Dodge and Pierre Laporte?” he said.
“Here are their footprints as plain as anything,” continued Allan. “Look for yourselves, because all of you know what they were like. Here’s where Hank rested the butt of his gun on the ground, while he talked it over with Pierre; and yes, he even emptied his pipe right at this place, knocking it on his shoe, because you can see some half-burned tobacco in this footprint.”
“Do you think they knew who Bumpus was?” asked Thad.
“They could guess, easy enough, after remembering what we said about our having a tenderfoot chum wandering around here by himself,” was the prompt reply of the trail finder.
“But then, it wasn’t any of their business,” Giraffe went on to say. “They might have had curiosity enough to figure out who Bumpus was; but they’d never seen him, and so of course he hadn’t done anything to injure them.”