Roy was very much sobered by this whole affair, but he could not refrain from his usual comment, “The plot grows thinner.”
“Come on, let’s follow those,” said Tom.
They did so until the prints ended abruptly upon the flat, rocky surface near the edge of the precipice.
“I don’t know what to make of the whole business,” said Roy. “Blamed if I do! It’s a puzzle.”
“My idea,” said Tom, as they started down again, “is this; the other fellow was down there below somewhere and was going to follow that fellow, when all of a sudden he fell. They must have chosen that way just for a stunt, I suppose. Didn’t you ever hear that red-headed fellows are reckless? It might possibly be,” he added, hesitatingly, “that the other fellow managed to get his—his body and drag it around up this way. That might account for the way that path looked back there; if someone had been dragged along it might sort of wipe out the footprints. I don’t see how he could have got so far ahead of us, though,” he added.
“But where could he have taken the—body?”
“I don’t know—unless he managed to carry it to that automobile or whatever it was back there. Maybe they’d left some kind of a car there to go out on the lake.”
“But all that wouldn’t account for those other footprints we saw out toward the edge,” said Roy, skeptically.
“No,” said Tom, “unless the other fellow went out there and tried to find out, maybe, how the dead fellow had happened to fall. Maybe a tree that he had hold of broke—or something.”
“Then there ought to be footprints back,” said Roy.