“Look here!” cried Tim, who had been doing some hunting on his own account. “Somebody looked in the window at us last night!”
He pointed to a row of fingerprints on the ledge of the window, and the boys crowded around in excitement. There were ten fingermarks in the snow that clung to the outside sill.
“I wonder if those prints were there before we came,” Mac mused. “That snow is hard.”
“They have been made by somebody who leaned down hard,” Kent decided, studying the marks. “You can see where the snow broke under his fingers. I didn’t look at this window ledge before, so I don’t know whether they were here before or not.”
None of the boys had noticed the marks, but all of them were inclined to believe that whoever had stolen the sled had peered in the window and had made the prints. They were gripped with a feeling of mystery.
“Things are starting pretty quickly,” Barry said, somewhat grimly.
Mac glanced inside the cabin door and then sprinted forward with a shout. “Hey! The coffee is boiling all over the place!”
The accident to the beverage was more of a benefit than an evil, because the boys had been standing in the cold air long enough to feel somewhat chilled. At Mac’s frantic whoop they crowded back into the building, and Kent rescued the blackened pot, scorching his hands in the act.
They lost no time now in dispatching breakfast, and during the meal they discussed the trend of events. The fact that someone had been close to them during the night put them on their guard, and they determined to make a search for the missing sled at once.
“We need that sled,” Tim declared. “When we go back to town we don’t want to have to pack all the stuff on our backs.”