He sent a man to camp with a note to the foreman, requesting him to send down two hundred cups, and he shepherded the chippers back to their work. They went reluctantly and showed a disposition to keep together, and Joe had to follow them closely all day. A little before noon a wagon came with the cups, and Burnam came with it, in great indignation.
“Won’t do to have this happen again,” he said. “These are about the last cups in the camp. Find any trace of who did it?”
There seemed to be no trace. The two of them searched the woods for several hours, without finding how the cups had been taken. The smooth carpet of pine-needles showed no track of wheels or hoofs, and yet so many cups could hardly have been carried away by hand.
It was only after Burnam had gone that Joe came upon a clue. He discovered a single wheelmark in the damp earth near the creek swamp—apparently the track of a wheelbarrow. It seemed to have passed that way several times, and the track did not appear to lead toward that part of the woods where the cups had been taken, yet there could be hardly any doubt that the thieves had used the barrow for transporting the stolen gum.
Within a hundred feet he lost the trail on the smooth pine litter. He searched the woods in widening circles, scrutinizing every spot of soft ground. He was lucky enough to pick up the trail again a hundred yards away; lost it, found it again, and within half an hour more he came upon the wheelbarrow itself, cunningly hidden under a dense gallberry-thicket.
The implement was smeared with unmistakable, telltale marks of gum and rosin. Joe was about to confiscate it, but, on second thoughts, he left it where it was, and went away immediately. Probably the thieves would attempt to use it again that night, and it would serve as a bait.
He sent Sam back to camp to bring down some food, and tell the foreman that he would not be in that night. He had determined to lie in wait in the woods and solve the mystery.
It was a mystery which thickened, for as he was riding away Snowball trod in something curiously sticky and Joe glancing down, saw that it was turpentine gum. Dismounting, he found fully two gallons of the stuff loosely covered with rubbish. It might have been spilled by accident, but it looked as if it had been poured there intentionally.
Why anybody should have taken the risk of stealing the gum only to pour it out again Joe could not imagine. The negroes finished work and started up the road. Sam brought him a packet of meat and corn-bread and a bottle of cold coffee, and left him. Joe ate his supper, tethered Snowball where there was grass, and, as the woods darkened, he ambushed himself behind a screen of young pines near the hidden wheelbarrow, laid the little rifle across his knees, and waited.
It was a hot night once more. Mosquitoes hummed viciously, and numbers of large bats circled overhead. A strange, hot smell rose from the river swamps close by, full of the odor of flowers, of bay-leaves, of rotting vegetation; it was so strong that his head swam. Fever was in that heavy air.