Tom might have gone around the house, but someone else had climbed through the pantry window.
For a while Roy and his trusty ally, the pocket flashlight, had a pretty rough tussle of it with the secretive floor of pine-needles in the woods beyond the fence; but Tom’s own uncertain pauses and turnings and kneelings helped him, and he was thankful that his predecessor had left these signs of his own movements to guide him. For he now felt certain that Tom had passed here in the wake of someone else.
It was a long time before he found himself in the beaten path, having covered a distance of perhaps an eighth of a mile where his tracking had been, as he later said himself, like hunting for a pin on a carpet in the dark. He had been on his hands and knees most of the time, shooting his light this way and that, moving the pine-needles carefully away from some fancied indentation, with almost a watchmaker’s delicacy of touch. It was not so much tracking as it was the working out of a puzzle, but it brought him at last into the path and then he found something which rendered further tracking unnecessary. This was the flask which had lain beside Tom’s father.
And now Roy, with no human presence to distract him as Tom had had, noticed something lying near the flask which Tom had not seen. This was a little scrap of pasteboard which had evidently been the corner of a ticket, and holding his flashlight to it he examined it carefully. There was the termination of a sentence, “...ers’ Union,” and the last letters of a name, “...ade,” which had been written with ink on a printed line.
It meant nothing to him except as the slightest thing means something to a scout, but he began searching diligently for more of the torn fragments of this card. The breeze had been there before him and he had crept on hands and knees many feet in every direction before his search was rewarded by enough of these scattered scraps to enlighten him. But the light which they shed was like a searchlight!
Using his membership card for a background and some pine gum to stick the fragments to it, he succeeded in restoring enough of the card to learn that it was a membership card of the Bricklayers’ Union belonging to one William Slade.
Then, all of a sudden, he caught the whole truth and understood what had happened.
[Chapter XIV]
Roy to the Rescue
It was late when Roy reached camp and he spoke to no one. Early in the morning he repaired to Five Oaks to “beard the lion in his den” and have a personal interview with Mr. John Temple.