“Some one came along in another auto while we were in the cave,” said the hunter, “pulled up here alongside of yours, hitched on to it and pulled it away, or else rode off in it.”
“What makes you think so?” asked Jerry.
“I haven’t hunted an’ trapped twenty years for nothin’, young man,” was the answer. “I can see the tracks your machine made as it stopped under a tree. Then along comes another machine, with tires a leetle mite smaller’n yours. Auto No. 2 stops. Some one gits out from it an’ looks over your auto, for I kin see marks of hob-nailed shoes, an’ none of us wear ’em.”
“Hob-nails, did you say, eh?” here interrupted Nestor.
“That’s what I said.”
“Then Tom Dalsett has been here.”
“How do you know?”
“Look an’ see if the soles of the hob-nailed shoes didn’t have a cross in each one.”
“They did,” replied the hunter, inspecting the tracks.
“Then it’s Tom Dalsett for sure. He always wore shoes like that, an’ I seen ’em on him when he was at Dead Man’s Gulch.”