The rowers obeyed, without much confidence as to the result, it must be confessed, and when Mr. Swan and his party arrived, having all turned back to see what it was that had attracted the attention of the boys, neither they nor their boat were in sight. There was something on the bank, however, that instantly caught the sharp eye of one of the guides, who at once proceeded to take himself to task in a way that would have excited his ire if any one else had done it.
“Hit me over the head with a paddle, somebody,” said he. “I’m going to throw up my position when I get back to the lake, and quit guiding. I ain’t no good any more. I come along here not ten minutes ago, and didn’t see what them boys saw at once. Look at them bushes, and then look at that,” he added, pulling his boat closer to the bank, and placing the blade of his oar in a little depression in the edge of the water. “Matt Coyle shoved that scow of his’n over them bushes, and that’s what barked them and made them bend over that way. He suspicioned that some of us would see it, so he come back and stood right there where my oar is, and tried to straighten the bushes up with a pole or something.”
“That’s so,” said Mr. Swan, to his employer, “Didn’t I tell you that he was a sharp one? The tricks that that fellow don’t know ain’t worth knowing.”
Just then a twig snapped on the bank and Joe Wayring came into view. “Don’t talk so loud,” he whispered, as he held up his finger warningly. “Matt’s scow isn’t twenty feet from here, and that’s all the proof I want that his camp is close at land.”
Instantly seven pairs of oars were dropped into the water, and as many boats were forced through the bushes and into the little bay on the other side. There lay the piratical craft which had done her best to send the skiff to the bottom of the pond, but nothing was to be seen or heard of her crew.
“Keep still, every body,” cautioned Mr. Swan, in the lowest possible whisper. “They’re out there in the woods, but remember that they ain’t caught yet, and that they won’t be if their ears tell them that we’re coming.”
Joe afterward said that the trail that led from the scow into the bushes was so plain that a blind man could have followed it; so it seemed that, for once, Matt had forgotten to be careful. No doubt he thought that the bay in which his scow found a resting-place, was so effectually hidden by the bushes in front of it, that it would never be discovered by a pursuing party. We have seen that he had good reason for this belief. If Joe and his chums had decided to remain at the lake and enjoy themselves there while their skiff was being repaired, instead of joining their forces with Mr. Swan’s hunting party, it is probable that the squatter’s retreat never would have been discovered; and neither would the pursuers—well, I’ll wait until I get to that before I tell about it.
Mr. Swan, who was the acknowledged leader of the party, at once shouldered his rifle and began following up the trail, the others falling in in single file behind him. They moved so silently that I could not hear a leaf rustle; and I told myself that the surprise and capture of the squatter and his whole shiftless tribe was a foregone conclusion. I afterward learned that Mr. Swan and the guides who were with him thought so too. Before they had gone fifty yards, the former suddenly stopped and whispered to the man next behind him—
“We are close upon them. I smell smoke.”
“And I smell coffee,” replied the man to whom the words were addressed, and who sniffed the air as if he were trying to locate the camp by the aid of his nose instead of his eyes, “and bacon.”