First of all, he had observed that a little blind trail seemed to lead westward from the tree, and in no other direction, as if it had been made by someone who visited the tree and then returned by the way he had come, going no farther in any direction. The trail was so blind that Tom could not be sure it was a trail at all. If so, it had been traversed very infrequently, and at rather long intervals. If it had been the only suggestive thing seen, the boy would probably not have given it a thought. But he observed also that the bark of the gum tree was a trifle scarred at two points, suggesting that some one with heavy boots on had recently climbed it.
As soon as the other boys had gone back to camp, Tom set to work to make a closer inspection of his surroundings. He climbed the tree to the crotch and looked about him. There was nothing there, but from that height he could trace the little trail through the bushes for perhaps fifty or a hundred yards. He satisfied himself in that way that it was really a trail, made by the passage of some living thing, man or beast, through the dense undergrowth.
“I’ll follow that trail after a while,” he resolved, “but I’ll say nothing about it now. I might be laughed at for my pains. Not that I mind that, of course. We fellows are well used to being laughed at among ourselves. But when I say anything about this, I want to have something to tell that is worth telling. After all, it may be only the path of a deer or of one of the queer little wild horses—tackeys, they call them—that live in the swamps. Or a wild hog may have made it. I don’t know, and I’m not going to talk about the thing till I can talk to some purpose.”
As he wriggled around in the crotch, he dropped his knife from his pocket.
“That’s a reminder,” he reflected, “that people sometimes drop things when they don’t intend to. If anybody else has been roosting up here he may have dropped things, too. I’ll recover my knife and then I’ll search around the tree.”
He was on the ground now, and having replaced his knife he began a minute search of the space for ten or twenty feet around the tree. It was thickly carpeted with the densely-growing vegetation that is always quick to take possession of every unoccupied inch of ground in the far southern swamps and woodlands. Searching such a space for small objects was almost a hopeless task, and finding nothing, Tom was on the point of giving up the attempt, when he trod upon something. Examining it, he found it to be an old corncob pipe with a short cane stem. It was blackened by long smoking, and that side of it which had lain next to the ground had begun to decay. But there was half-burned tobacco in it still.
From all these facts Tom thought it likely that the pipe, while still alight, had been dropped from the tree, and that its owner had failed to find it upon his descent.
“That means that somebody was using this tree for a lookout a good while ago. I can’t imagine why or wherefore, but I mean to find out if I can. Just now I hear Larry’s whistle calling me to dinner. I wonder how he manages to make that shrill shrieking noise by putting two fingers into his mouth and blowing between them. I must get him to teach me the trick.”
It was decided at dinner that the deer hunt should occur as soon as that meal was finished.