At that both the others advanced cautiously and stared beyond the big clump of high bushes. They almost immediately shrank back again, and the look on their faces announced the receipt of quite a shock.
“Great Cæsar! is that chap the man you’ve both been talking about, tell me?” asked Toby, half under his breath.
“He is certainly the party I saw Fred talking with so mysteriously,” asserted Jack, positively.
“And the same fellow who was walking along the road with Fred while I sat on my log, fishing,” added Steve, convincingly.
“But what under the sun is he doing out here near Fred’s house, leaning on that fence, and keeping tabs on the little Badger home, I’d like to know?” Toby went on to say, wonder written in big letters on his face.
CHAPTER IX
A FAIRY IN THE BADGER HOME
“Let’s watch and see what it all means?” suggested Steve, quickly.
Even Jack did not seem averse to doing that same thing. In fact, his curiosity had been aroused to fever pitch by so unexpectedly discovering the very man of whom they had been lately talking hovering around poor Fred’s home in such a suspicious fashion.
Peeping around the high bushes again, they saw him leaning idly on the picket fence. He seemed to have a stout cane, and was smoking a cigar, though in his undoubted eagerness to keep “tabs” on the humble house he forgot to draw smoke from the weed between his teeth.