He and Dave started off at a swinging gait. The first time Prescott turned to look behind him Reade and Danny Grin had already vanished.
Dick kept close to the shore, Dave moving in a parallel line a few steps up the slope.
"There isn't any hut, lodge or camp down there," Dave called softly, "or else we'd have seen it from our camp on the other side of the lake."
"I know it," Dick nodded. "What I'm trying to do is to see if I can find any hint, on the shore, of how that fellow landed yesterday, without Tom or Danny catching sight of him. Of course, a very clever swimmer could have gone quite a distance under water. and I want to see if I can find any sign of anything that would have hidden his landing from the fellows in the canoe."
"Oh!" nodded Dave understandingly.
The full ten minutes of searching passed without the slightest trace of a discovery.
"Halt," Dick called up smilingly. "Now, join me, Darry, while
I count off the hundred steps up the slope."
This done, the chums started backward, keeping a course as nearly parallel with the shore as was possible.
"Now, try to be keener than ever," Dick urged, as Dave paced off another twenty steps higher up. "We're in a growth of deeper forest, with a bigger tangle of underbrush and it will be easy enough to overlook something."
The two boys trudged on. They were five minutes on their way back, perhaps, when Dick heard a sudden scrambling in the underbrush not far away. Then Prescott caught sight of a human figure, yet so fleetingly that he could have given no description of it.