"How does the mystery increase?" Darrin inquired.
"For one thing, we don't always find the bootmarks of the men who were with Mr. Dodge. Yet once in a while we do. There are the prints of all three. When Theodore Dodge passed by this way the other two men were with him, or had him in sight. And our course shows that the three were plunging deeper and deeper into the woods. But come along. There must be an end to this, somewhere."
Ten minutes later Prescott and Darrin felt that they had come to the end of the mystery. For the faint trail had led them up a slight, stony slope, and now the two boys lay flat on the ground.
Below them, in a bush-clad hollow, two miles from the world in general, stood a little, old, ramshackle shanty. The location was one that seekers would hardly have found without a trail to lead them to it.
To the door of this shanty a broad-shouldered, rough-looking and powerful fellow of forty had just come. The man, who was poorly clad, wore brogans, and held in his right hand a weighty, ugly-looking club. The fellow was smoking a short-stemmed pipe, and now stood, with his left hand shading his eyes, peering off at the surrounding landscape.
Dick and Dave hugged the ground more closely behind their screen of bushes.
"It's all right, Bill," announced the lookout in the doorway.
"'Course this," growled a voice from the inside. "Too far from the main line o' travel for anyone to be spying around. Besides, no one guesses——-"
"Well, you can go to sleep if ye wanter, Bill. I'm goin' ter sit up and smoke."
With that the brogan-shod man disappeared inside the shanty.
Dick and Dave glanced at each other with eager interest.