"You and your glues!" said Larry, laughing. "Come on, Find-Outers! This is going to be exciting!"
Clues and - Clear-orf!
The five children and Buster made their way down the drive and into the lane. They passed Mr. Hick's house, and went on down the winding lane until they came to where the cottage had been burnt down. There was a tiny wooden gate that opened on to an over-grown path leading to the cottage. The children planned to go down that, because then, they hoped, nobody would see them.
There was a horrid smell of smoke and burning still on the air. It was a still April day, very sunny and warm. Celandines lay in golden sheets everywhere.
The children opened the wooden gate and went up the overgrown path. There stood what was left of the workroom, a ruined, blackened heap. It had been a very small cottage, once two-roomed, but the dividing wall had been taken down by Mr. Hick, and then there had been one big room suitable for him to work in.
"Now," said Larry, half-whispering. "We've got to look about and see if we can find anything to help us."
It was plainly no use to look about where all the watchers had been the night before. The garden was completely trampled down just there, and the criss-cross of footprints was everywhere. The children separated, and very solemnly began to hunt about alongside the overgrown path to the cottage, and in the tall hedges that overhung the ditches at the bottom of the garden.
Buster looked too, but as he had a firm idea that every one was hunting for rabbits, he put his nose down each rabbit hole, and scraped violently and hopefully. It always seemed to him a great pity that rabbits didn't make their holes big enough for dogs. How easy, then, to chase a scampering bunny!
"Look at Buster hunting for clues," said Pip, with a giggle.
The children looked for footprints. There were none on the path, which was made of cinders, and showed no footmarks at all, of course. They looked about in the celandines that grew in their hundreds beside the path. But there was nothing to be seen there either.