CHAPTER XIV
TRAILING THE STOLEN MONEY
Several miles away from the wagon trail that led from Staretta to the now destroyed Longknives' clubhouse, two boys were groping along in the falling twilight in a discouraged manner.
Around them stretched seemingly endless vistas of burned and blackened forest, stark, leafless, forbidding. Under foot was a sooty, miry quagmire of rain-soaked soil, naturally low, swampy in places, and now all but impassable. The rain had subsided into a misty drizzle, soft, fine, yet penetrating.
"Gee but I'm tired, Chip!" said the younger of the two, lifting with effort one foot after the other from the deep mud underneath.
"Well, she is gettin' rather bad," replied the other. "Won't be much moon tonight, I reckon."
"D'you suppose the other boys will start out such a day as this?"
"Dunno; hard to tell. But we've come a right smart ways, Paul, and so far as I kin see we're gettin' further and further into these big woods."
"But we've never lost old Murky's trail. Have we, now?"
"Nope! Dark as it is, I kin make it out. You know when we started out we noticed that one of his shoes or boots had a prong on one side of the heel. Well, here she is–see?"
And Chip Slider pointed to a deep impression made apparently by a big shoe-nail or some other peculiarity which the lads had noted earlier when the light was better. Paul grunted a tired assent.