"Hush!" whispered Tom, and parted the bushes with one hand, his other still clinging to the mastic's collar.
There was a tiny opening in the shrubbery. It surrounded the foot of a huge beech tree. In some past day a careless hunter had built a fire close to the trunk of this tree. It was now hollow at the base, but vines and creepers growing up the tall tree had hidden the opening.
A man was on his knees at the foot of the tree and had drawn the matted curtain of creepers aside with one hand while with the other he reached in to the full length of his arm. He had no suspicion of the presence of the young people and Reno.
Out of the hollow in the tree trunk he drew something wrapped in an old pair of overalls. He unwrapped it, still with his back to the spot where the dog and his master and the girls stood. But the three friends could see over his shoulder as he knelt on the ground, and saw plainly that the object he had withdrawn from the tree trunk was a flat black box, evidently japanned, and there was a fair-sized brass padlock which fastened it.
"Ha, ha, ha!" chuckled the man to himself, as he wrapped the box up again in the old clothes, and then thrust it hastily into the hollow tree. "Safe yet! safe yet!"
He rose up then and without even looking about him, started directly away from the glen. He plainly had no suspicion of the presence of the dog and the trio of young folks. When he was quite out of sight and sound, Tom whispered, patting Reno:
"I declare, girls! That was Jasper Parloe!"
"That mean thing!" returned his sister. "I guess he's a miser as well as a hermit; isn't he?"
"Looks like it. I've a good mind to take that thing he put in there and hide it somewhere else. He wouldn't be so sure about it's being safe then; would he?"
"No! Don't you touch his nasty things, Tom," advised Helen, turning away.