The marks of horse and wagon were quite as plain in the faint light of dawn as they had been the night before. In the darkness the thief had driven his wagon over some small stumps, amid which his horse had scrambled in some difficulty, it was plain.
Hiram, tracing out these marks as a Red Indian follows a trail, saw something upon the edge of one of the half-decayed stumps that interested him greatly.
He stood up the next moment with this clue in his hand—a white, coarse hair, perhaps four inches in length.
“That was scraped off the horse's fetlock as he scrambled over this stump,” muttered Hiram. “Now, who drives a white horse, or a horse with white feet, in this neighborhood?
“Can I narrow the search down in this way, I wonder?” and for some moments the youth stood there, in the growing light of early morning, canvassing the subject from that angle.
CHAPTER XXVII. RUN TO EARTH
A broad streak of crimson along the eastern horizon, over the treetops, announced the coming of the sun when Hiram Strong reached the automobile road to which he, on the previous night, had traced the thief that had stolen Sister's poults.
Now he looked at the track again. It surely had come from the direction of Scoville, and it turned back that way.
Yet he looked at the white horse-hair scraped off upon the stump, and he turned his back upon these signs and strode along the road toward his own home.