“By Jove!” he exclaimed; “that’s queer. I wish I’d questioned Sleuth about it.”
“What are you driving at now?” asked his companion.
“It just occurred to me that, after all, this paper may have been dropped here by Piper, although I don’t quite understand how it could have been. If so, he must have come here recently—as recently as yesterday or the day before.”
“Nothing to it,” declared Hooker positively. “He was at school both those days, and he has practiced regularly with the teams every night. He had no time to come here.”
“Unless he did so in the night—night before last. But I don’t see why he——”
“You couldn’t hire him to come here alone at night,” asserted Hooker; “he’s too big a coward. A great detective should have plenty of courage, but a rabbit is a lion compared with Sleuthy.”
“He may have had someone with him.”
“If so, it was some fellow we know, and we’ll find out about it. But I don’t think there’s the remotest chance that it can be so, for he would have announced the fact when we caught him face to face a short time ago. It would have served as an excuse for his presence this morning. Why, he could have claimed that he had come here ahead of us to look the ground over and plan for a duck hunt. He could have accused us of being encroachers. Forget it, Fred; Sleuth never dropped that paper in this camp.”
“Which,” said Sage regretfully, “leaves us just where we were before, up against a mystery. I’m not going to puzzle my head over it any more.”
“A sensible decision.” nodded Roy. “I’m inclined to fancy you’ve placed too much importance on that particular scrap of a newspaper.”