"Good! that's an idea; let's try it," rejoined Hickory.
And being by this time at the hotel, they went in. In another moment they were shut up in Mr. Byrd's room, with a large sheet of foolscap before them.
"Now," cried Horace, taking up a pencil, "begin with your description, and I will follow with my drawing."
"Very well," replied Hickory, setting himself forward in a way to watch his colleague's pencil. "I leave the widow's house by the dining-room door—a square for the house, Byrd, well down in the left-hand corner of the paper, and a dotted line for the path I take,—run down the yard to the fence, leap it, cross the bog, and make straight for the woods."
"Very good," commented Byrd, sketching rapidly as the other spoke.
"Having taken care to enter where the trees are thinnest, I find a path along which I rush in a bee-line till I come to the glade—an ellipse for the glade, Byrd, with a dot in it for the hut. Merely stopping to dash into the hut and out again——"
"Wait!" put in Byrd, pausing with his pencil in mid-air; "what did you want to go into the hut for?"
"To get the bag which I propose to leave there to-night."
"Bag?"
"Yes; Mansell carried a bag, didn't he? Don't you remember what the station-master said about the curious portmanteau the fellow had in his hand when he came to the station?"