But when he saw the plain marks of a woman’s shoes in the dust at the side of the road, Bert had to admit that there might have been some woman along there. The footprints came on to the highway at a place where a narrow path wound back into the woods, and they showed that the woman, whoever she was, had come out of the clump of trees and had walked along the dusty road.
“There! What’d I tell you?” exclaimed Freddie. “Wasn’t an old woman along here with a green umbrella? I saw it!”
“Some woman has been here—that’s plain enough,” Bert had to say. “But I can’t tell by these marks how old she was, and nobody could tell if she had a green umbrella or not.”
“If she had an umbrella, and she kept sticking the end down in the dirt like daddy sticks his cane on Sundays, then you could tell,” said Freddie.
“Yes,” admitted Bert, “then you could tell. But I don’t see any umbrella marks.”
Neither could Freddie, but he was sure he had seen the green umbrella passing along the highway. But it had been held up, and the old woman was probably using it as a sunshade; so Freddie had to admit that it could not have made marks in the dust.
The boys followed the trail of the woman’s footsteps in the dust as far as they could see them. Then the woman, whoever she was, had stepped from the side of the highway, where the dust was thickest, into the hard, middle part, where there were many wheel marks, both of automobiles and wagons, and also the prints of horses’ feet.
“We’ve lost ’em!” announced Bert, as the footprints vanished. “No use trailing her any farther.”
“Can’t you tell which way she went?” asked Freddie.
“No,” his brother replied. “Maybe she turned around and walked back, or maybe she kept on, and, if she did, she might have turned off on any cross road. No use following her any farther, Freddie.”