"Ill luck!" echoed Chatz, once more looking in the direction of the ramshackle old mill.
"But see here," remarked Matty, "tell us about Nat, won't you? When was his queer disappearance first noticed, Elmer?"
"Well, when Lil Artha and myself arrived here we found Toby and Ty throwing stones out in the pond, scaring the little red-marked turtles that were sitting by dozens on every old log and rock, and great big bullfrogs as well."
"Never saw so many whopping big frogs in all my life," declared Ty.
"You see," explained Toby, "we missed Nat, but thought he had just wandered off to look around. Ty and me, why, we felt too tired to explore things till the rest came along."
"Oh, but you could amuse yourselves throwing things into the water, eh?" Matty remarked, with such a vein of sarcasm in his voice that Toby immediately aroused to defend himself.
"'Twa'n't that at all, Matty Eggleston; prove it by Ty here if either of us was afraid to go inside your old haunted mill, was we, Ty?" he exclaimed, with a fine show of righteous indignation.
"Course we wasn't," Ty hastened to declare, with a decided shake of his tousled head. "We walked along the shore till we came to a nice shady place, and then squatted down, meanin' to wait till Elmer showed up. Then I popped a rock at a sassy little turkle, and pretty soon both of us were letting fly."
"When did you miss Nat, and where was he the last you saw him?" asked Matty, who was expected some day to become a lawyer.
"Oh!" answered Toby, "he said he'd hang around the dam here and look into things. You know Nat always did want to pry into everything he saw."