All except Billy set out after lunch to learn whether the suspected Murky had deserted his usual hiding place. Slider was the guide. He led the others quite directly to the logs where the tramp had made his bed and headquarters.
The fellow had apparently departed. He had left the pan and other utensils taken from the boys' camp but the blankets he had carried with him. They were nowhere to be seen, at any rate.
More certain than ever, then, that it was this unscrupulous villain who had decoyed Dave across the lake and in some manner forced their friend to accompany him, the lads hurried back to camp.
Again they rowed to the north shore and with utmost determination plunged into the hot, close woods.
CHAPTER VII
THE LONG-HIDDEN TREASURE IS UNCOVERED
And now, while the weary young searchers were hastening resolutely into the woods to the north of the lake, they were leaving in the forest to the south one who would well bear watching. I do not mean Chip Slider sitting alone, tired and melancholy, beside the shelter of poles, wondering if there could possibly be any place where trouble did not come. No–not Chip, but a man who at this moment stood looking into the little valley where the last camp of the road builders had been.
A somewhat portly, somewhat pompous and self-important appearing individual was this man. His bristly hair, cut very short, was tinged with gray under the large, loose-fitting cap such as golfers and motorists wear. His face was smooth, puffy and red. His very eyes, more touched with red, also, than they should have been, as well as his pudgy hands indicated self-indulgence and love of ease.
Presently the cap and the person under it moved from the rise of ground, above the road builders' last camp, down into the valley. With a smile that had too much of a sneer about it to be pleasant, the man ground his heel into the gravel where the Longknives' road had come to its troubled ending. With the same disagreeable sneer in his manner that accompanied his unpleasant smile, he turned here and there, noting how the brush and stunted stalks of mullen were springing up all about the unfinished task the workmen had left.
Startled suddenly out of his reverie by a bluejay's scream, or some other noise–he may have fancied it, he thought–the man looked hastily, searchingly about him; but satisfied, apparently, that he was alone, he moved leisurely into a shaded place and sat himself down on a stump–another token of the great road that had been begun but never completed. Quite carefully he drew up his trousers at the knees, then picked from his hosiery, whose bright color showed in considerable expanse above his oxfords, some bits of dry grass and pine needles gathered in his walk. Mr. Lewis Grandall had come, apparently, to view the work his perfidy had caused to be abandoned.