“For the salt-marshes high up on the other side of the river, I guess! I think he landed there.”
“Then, he’s probably hiding in the woods beyond the marshes. We must search them. That French-Canadian, Toiney Leduc, who’s camping with you, has worked as a lumberman in those woods; he knows them well, and is a good trailer. I’d like to have him for a guide this morning.” Here the officer turned to the scoutmaster. “And if you have no objection I think it would be well that those two boys should come with us,” he nodded toward Scouts Warren and Chase. “They can identify the man whom they saw trying to enter that bungalow last night.”
There is nothing at all inspiriting about a man-hunt; so Nixon and Leon decided when, within an hour, they landed from the police boat on the familiar salt-marshes high up the river, and silently took their way across them, in company with Toiney and the policemen, over the uplands into the woods.
They had come upon the fugitive’s boat, hidden among a clump of bushes near the river. Using that as a starting-point, Toiney followed Dave Baldwin’s trail into the maze of woodland; though how he did so was to the boy scouts a problem, for to them it seemed blind work.
But the guide in the tasseled cap, blue shirt, and heelless high boots, would stop now and again at a soft spot on the marshes or uplands, or when they came to a swampy patch in the woods; at such times he would generally drop on all fours with a muttered: “Ha! V’là ses pis!” in his queer patois. “Dere’s heem step!” And anon: “Dere me fin his feets again!”
When there was no footprint to guide him Toiney would stoop down and read the story of the dry pine-needles, just faintly disturbed by the toe of a rough boot which had kicked them aside a little in passing.
Or he would carefully examine a broken twig, the wood of which, being whitish and not discolored, showed that it had been recently snapped by a tread heavier than that of a fox; and again they would hear him mutter in his quaint dialect: “Tiens! le tzit ramille cassé: de littal stick broke! I’ll t’ink hees step jus’ here—engh?”
It was a lesson in trailing which the two boy scouts never forgot as they took their way through the thick woods, fairly well known to them now, past Varney’s Paintpot, Rattlesnake Brook, and other points of interest.
Ere they reached the Bear’s Den, however, the trail which Toiney had been following seemed to turn off at an angle and then double backward through the woods, in an opposite direction to that in which they had been pursuing it.
“Mebbe she’s no’ de same trail?” pondered the guide aloud. “Mebbe dere’s oder man’s feets, engh?”