Perhaps if he were smart he could overtake them and demand restitution.
It stood to reason that the rascals could not have returned along the same path, for he would have met them.
He bent down to examine the ground and could easily see where the marks of several wet and heavy shoes continued along the trial that followed the creek.
Darry immediately started off on a run.
Hardly five minutes later, as he turned a bend, he had a glimpse of a figure just leaving the path and entering the woods bordering the swamp.
So far as he knew he had not been noticed; but to make sure he crept along under the shelter of neighboring bushes until he reached the place where the moving figure had caught his eye.
Voices now came to his ear, and it was easy enough to follow the three slouching figures that kept pushing deeper into the swamp.
He even saw his precious traps on their backs, together with several muskrats which Jim himself carried.
Perhaps their first idea was to throw the traps into the oozy water of the swamp, so that they could never be found again; but then those steel contraptions represented a cash value of a dollar or so, and money appealed strongly to these fellows; so they hung on, with the idea of placing them in a hollow tree, where, later, they could be found and sold.
Darry knew that he was going to recover his own, and he now watched the movements of the three with more or less curiosity.