Then the trail of fur fragments disappeared and was replaced by the imprint of several snowshoes, as they at last reached soft snow.
All three bent to examine the tracks. There were three pair of snow-shoe tracks and one pair of small boot tracks.
“The boot tracks are Sandy’s, I’m pretty sure,” was Corporal McCarthy’s confident statement. “The snow-shoe tracks must have been made by those who captured him, unless someone picked up his trail after the moon came up.”
Hastening onward, they followed an unbroken trail for nearly a half hour, when they again were discouraged upon reaching more crusted snow upon which the trail vanished. But not long were they at loss. Running ahead a short distance, Dick stooped and picked up something which he waved triumphantly to Toma and the Corporal. It was another bit of bearskin.
“Sandy’s started marking his trail again!” Dick called.
“I’m getting so I’m not so sure just who has been leaving these markers,” Corporal McCarthy said. “That knife we found back there makes me wonder if it’s really Sandy who has dropped those pieces of fur.”
“Why, who could it be then?” Dick asked incredulously.
“We’ll see, we’ll see,” was the policeman’s enigmatic reply. “But in the meantime you two fellows be ready to obey orders.”
Wondering what the Corporal was hinting at, Dick started out to find more of the trail markers. About every fifty or a hundred feet they found them, so that there was no doubt as to the fact that they were going right.
Corporal McCarthy cautioned them to keep their eyes open now, for they had reached the end of the level snow and were among some large snowdrifts formed by huge boulders that had lodged the snow. Directly over their heads loomed the long upward slant of the high moraine which had so long served them as a landmark. However, they were in a part of the country unfamiliar to them, and so did not know what to expect. Added to this the moonlight deceived the eyes, and made it difficult for them to tell a boulder from a living body.