Toma squinted up at it and shook his head.
“Five o’clock,” he corrected. “Soon as we get something to eat, better tramp some more. Dick, you give ’em me fishhook and line an’ mebbe by time you an’ Sandy get fire ready an’ bake clams, I catch some more fish.”
Toma had better luck even than Dick. A few minutes before the clams were baked, he appeared upon the scene with eight speckled beauties, none of which weighed less than two pounds. They cleaned and baked them all, wrapped up five in Dick’s moose-hide coat, made a pack of it, and started out upon their journey.
They went jubilantly. It was many hours before the sun swung down toward the northwestern horizon. Just as the twilight waned and the half-night of the Arctic dropped its mantle over the earth, Toma, who was twenty yards in the lead, suddenly stopped short and threw up his hands, shouting for his two companions to hurry. When they reached his side, he pointed down at the loose sand at his feet.
“Go—ood Heavens!” stammered Dick.
In the sand, plainly distinguishable, were the imprints of naked human feet.
CHAPTER VII.
BREEDS DON’T COUNT.
Who made those naked footprints in the sand? For hours afterward the boys puzzled over it, but could come to no satisfactory conclusion. Indians, as they well knew, seldom went barefoot. If, on the other hand, the tracks had been made by a white man, who was he and from whence had he come? Though they searched long and diligently for the remains of a campfire or other evidences of the stranger’s presence, none was to be found. The tracks could be followed for a distance of nearly a quarter of a mile along the shore, after which they turned away from the river and became lost in the thick moss that carpeted the woods.
Nor could they pick up the tracks again. Toma, whom nature and training had specially fitted for this kind of work, was forced to admit, finally, that even he was baffled. Given a little more time, he believed that he could find other imprints, but inasmuch as Sandy and Dick chafed at the delay already caused by the mysterious, barefoot stranger, he decided to concur with popular sentiment and try to think no more about it.
But it was not thus to be dismissed so lightly. The passing of time seemed only to add fresh interest to the puzzle. During the next two days it was the popular topic of discussion. New theories were advanced by one or other of the boys, argued over sometimes for hours, then relegated to the limbo of dead and forgotten things.