“Now for the trail!” exclaimed Bart when, after a hasty breakfast, the three boys, shouldering their guns, were ready to start. “Which way, Frank? You seem to have run across the track of these smugglers, and it’s up to you to follow it. Lead on.”
“I guess we’ll have no difficulty in following the trail as far as it goes,” remarked Frank. “When a Chinaman goes walking he leave a track that can’t be duplicated by any other person or animal. Lucky it didn’t rain in the night, for what tracks there are will still be plain. And we don’t have to worry about a crowd walking over the place where they were. We’re not troubled by many neighbors in these woods.”
They started off with Frank in the lead, and he kept a careful watch for the Chinese footprints. At first they were easy to follow, as the ground was soft, and the queer cork-soled shoes had been indented deeply in the clay. But, after a time, the marks became so faint that, only here and there could they be distinguished.
Then it became necessary for Frank to station one of his chums at the place where the last step was seen, and prospect around, considerably in advance, until he picked up the next one.
“If we had a hound we wouldn’t have all this trouble,” he said.
“But, seeing as we haven’t, we’ll have to be our own dogs,” retorted Ned. “I guess we can manage it.”
They followed the footprints of the one Chinaman for a mile or more, and then they came to an end with an abruptness that was surprising, particularly as the last one was plainly to be seen in a patch of soft mud.
“Well, he evidently went up in a balloon,” announced Bart.
“It does look so, unless he had a pair of wings in his pocket,” supplemented Ned.
Frank went on ahead, looking with sharp eyes, for a recurrence of the prints. He went so far into the woods that Bart called to him.