Westy said, “If anybody sneaked into the shop I bet he didn’t go along the street when he came out, especially if the fire was already started.”
I said, “Well then, he must have crossed the street and hit into the Sneezenbunker land. If you look at the map I made you’ll see how everything was around there.”
So then we went across the street and looked at the edge of the field where it ran along by the sidewalk. Westy was standing in the field right between the two rusty old tracks and he called, “Here’s a footprint good and plain.”
Good night, we were in luck. Somebody had started walking the tracks toward the river. We couldn’t find footprints in the hard earth between the tracks, where they ran across the Sneezenbunker land, but when the tracks began getting into the low, damp ground toward Cat-tail Marsh, we could see the prints just as plain as writing.
Over the marsh the old tracks run on a kind of trestle and we had to walk the ties. There were no footprints, exactly, on the ties, but there were little chunks of mud on some of them. We were on the track of somebody, all right.
There were no more footprints when we got to Van Schlessenhoff’s field because the tracks run through the grass there. But there was no place to go down that way except to the river, and there wasn’t any building anywhere about except the little shack that the men use when they go rail shooting in the fall. That little shack is on Mr. Van Schlessenhoff’s field and I guess it’s about a couple of hundred feet from the tracks. It’s right close by the river.
We stopped where we were on the tracks and Westy said, “What shall we do? Go over to the shack?”
It was beginning to get dark now and it seemed pretty lonesome down there. It’s a dandy spot, down there by the river. The town seems a long distance away. You can only just see the top of the High School through the trees. I should worry, I wouldn’t care if I couldn’t see any of it. I was glad we were going to have our old car down there. It was awful still, except for the frogs croaking, and the crickets in the field.
I didn’t exactly want to go over to that shack and I guess Westy felt the same way. I’m not afraid of tramps but, gee whiz, I’m not especially stuck on bandits. And there were a lot of those around lately, shooting up automobiles.
“Well, we’re here and we’ve got to go over,” I said, “or else what was the use of coming down here? There’s somebody in that shack, I bet.”